“Hunt” (MA) *** and a half

IT took me a while to decide whether this South Korean movie was satirising parody or parodying satire. Or a lampoon of its subject matter (Hollywood movies from no particular era and every era for more than a century) in praise of itself by presenting itself at its most fatuous.

Some commentators suggest that “Hunt” deals with actual historical events in Korea in the ’80s. That’s as may be. What comes to the screen is a no-holds-barred send-up of more actioner movies than you can shake a stick at – before TV took possession of the genre, Hollywood churned out scads of B-grade movies.

In the ’80s, when the military dictatorship reached its peak, KCIA Foreign Unit chief Park Pyong-ho (Lee Jung-jae who also wrote and directed) and Domestic Unit chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung) were tasked with uncovering a North Korean spy, known as Donglim. 

When top-secret intel that could jeopardise national security begins leaking, the two units are each assigned to investigate each other. 

In this tense situation where if they cannot find the mole, they may be accused themselves, Pyong-ho and Jung-do slowly start to uncover the truth and become aware of a plot to assassinate the South Korean president.

Now, that sounds pretty serious stuff for a movie. And it is. Last month, Lee Jung-jae re-edited “Hunt” after Cannes for screening at Toronto International Film Festival for its North American premiere. Which one is screening here now, I cannot tell. And it doesn’t greatly matter. What does matter is how Lee structured it.

It runs for 131 minutes, crammed with firearms of many shapes and sizes spraying its environments and characters with brio and not much else (other than muzzle flashes). 

Some characters have lines to speak, others are there simply to fall down playing dead. The actors are difficult to identify or separate other than by sex. The dialogue is bizarre – a character says that something must be so – so it is so. Cars get wrecked more often than not – well, Hollywood has always been good at that. Towards the end, the film threatens to stop many times before actually rolling closing credits written mostly in Korean characters so beyond the comprehension of non-Korean viewers.

Did Lee Jung-jae intend his film to be so imitative of Hollywood potboilers from a bygone era of movies? Does he have a subtle sense of the ridiculous founded on awareness of his film’s stylistic antecedents? I don’t know. But it’s tolerably watchable and you might even enjoy the experience.

At Dendy and Palace Electric