Project Wolf Hunting (Kim Hong-seon, 2021)

A group of South Korean criminals have been captured in the Philippines.

To get them back to South Korea, the authorities enlist a large cargo ship.

However, a group of hijackers have infiltrated the crew and intend to free the prisoners.

What the police and criminals do not realise is that the ship contains another cargo: a dangerous super-soldier known as Alpha (Choi Gwi-hwa), who is being kept on ice for study.

Sadly for everyone onboard, Alpha wakes up…

When I was younger I loved tracking down genre mashups - every time I found something like The Hidden or Horror Express it was like finding a gold nugget in the river.

I was reminded of that thrill when I heard the descriptor for Project Wolf Hunting - Con Air meets Universal Soldier on a boat.

Cards on the table: I watched this movie at 10:30 pm. A younger Tim might have been able to power through; contemporary me was barely hanging on when it started and a grumpy old man by the end of it.

The first half, in which hijackers take over the boat is like a more visceral version of the Con Air takeover, with more spilled claret and louder sounder design.

It is tense and exciting, but it does lead to some confusion about POV as we move between multiple sets of characters.

The best performance comes from Seo In-guk as the leader of the hijackers, Jong-doo. He gives the movie a real sense of danger and unpredictability. 

The movie’s switch into sci-fi slasher is great - the filmmakers convey the monster’s speed by avoiding shots of the character moving - to show his speed, they use editing - a character will see him; he will register them, and in the next shot, he will be in the same shot killing them.

It is a simple, jarring choice that works.

As the monster goes through the cast, the movie adopts the structure of a slasher movie as the ensemble scatters and Alpha slaughters them in unpredictable ways.

One downside is that by the time we get to the final survivors, it felt like the movie had lost the most fleshed out characters.

We get some flashbacks late in the piece to explain someone’s backstory but it feels too late.

Most interestingly, the film ties Alpha's origins back to the Japanese occupation of Korea, and there seems to be an implied critique of peoples' continued willingness to keep the project which created him going.

Project Wolf Hunting sags a bit in the second half, but overall it is worth checking out.

The movie is apparently meant to be the start of a franchise - considering how heightened this movie gets, it will be interesting to see where it goes next.