Peninsula (2020)

 

Peninsula or as I like to call it, "The Walking Dead-Fury Road"

When they first announced a sequel to the critically acclaimed Korean zombie horror movie, Train to Busan, I was truly excited. Train to Busan was such a great movie overall. From the acting, the dialogue, the story and the zombie designs, there was little a horror movie buff could complain about.

What also made Train to Busan great was how human nature and human emotions like stupidity and selfishness played a major role in the progression of the movie. 

Train to Busan was like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book where the script writers had a general direction for the movie but wrote it based on what they thought a certain character would do in a certain situation and moved forward from there. Some would say it's half-assed, others would say it's genius. Let the characters decide how they were going to survive. Add a little zombie surprise here and there and see where it leads to. 

Peninsula on the other hand falls short of the performance its predecessor delivered. 

The overall movie takes place four years after the incidents of Train to Busan, with a nice little intro presenting the events that were taking place within the first 24 hours of the fall of South Korea due to the zombie outbreak. 

According to the movie, twenty-four hours was all it took for a country like South Korea to collapse. Granted, the zombies were sprinters, much like World War Z and 28 Weeks Later, but South Korean filmmakers weren't ambitious enough to suggest that their governments were adequate to contain an outbreak at this level, unlike western countries. 

A game of Twister gone wrong

Fast forward four years later, refugees on a ship from South Korea headed to Japan were suddenly diverted to Hong Kong instead. 

Hong Kong then became a new haven for South Koreans fleeing the zombie outbreak. As anyone who's been to Hong Kong or lived there on minimum wage would attest, it's no theme park, much more so when you're a refugee. So South Koreans, now waiting for their refugee status from the the Hong Kong government are doing their best to survive on a new island, however way they can.

Anyway, Peninsula revolves around Gang Dong-Won's character Jeong Seok, a former army man that suffered the loss of his sister and nephew within 24-hours of the outbreak. He now survives in Hong Kong by working for a white mob boss. 

Jeong Seok is given a task; travel to South Korea and retrieve a truck full of US dollars. Once there, he discovers that zombies aren't the only problem. Jeong Seok must fight through a wave of zombies and a rogue group of South Korean soldiers called Unit 631 or risk never leaving the island again. 

Now, the start of the movie starts off immediately after the events of Train to Busan where we get introduced to Jeong Seok's character and an unfortunate event aboard the ship the refugees are traveling on. 

It's simple enough, nothing fancy, great camera angles and build up before everything becomes fucked up beyond all recognition (FUBAR). 

However, the movie doesn't exactly throw itself down the shit hole to be considered a truly horrible movie, but it does rely too heavily on CGI to stop itself from becoming a great movie. As you continue to watch it, you realize that various parts of the movie just take too much from other movies to make it an original concept. The cage fight scenes between the infected and the non-infected come straight out of The Walking Dead.

The most over-the-top game of Tag.

The car driving scenes just look like Mad Max: Fury Road but with more Tokyo Drift thrown into it. Honestly, it was like watching Frankenstein's Monster in the form of a movie; too many parts from other movies lumped together to create one single movie. The fact remains that the CGI is extremely unimpressive and spoils the overall experience. 

In terms of acting, of course Korean actors can act, but the saving grace for the entire movie is the sibling duo Joon-I and Yu-Jin, played by Lee-Re and Lee Yewoen respectively. Even Gang Dong Won and Lee Jung-Hyun (Ming Jeong) fall short to deliver a memorable performance. 

The Jackson Five, minus two.

Overall, the movie wasn't exactly a failure, but it wasn't great either. Will it be as memorable as Train to Busan? Definitely not. Will it be repeat worthy? Probably not either. Was this sequel something the fans needed? Maybe. But all questions aside, the fact is, when you have an original as strong, compelling and memorable as Train to Busan, it's hard for anything to match up after that. 

In my opinion, South Korea is at the top of its game at the moment in terms of delivering tremendous horror movies, but Peninsula is not one of them. I'm glad I didn't watch this in the cinema, but if someone bought me tickets to it, I wouldn't complain. Peninsula leaves people hungry for more than what it delivered, but since we already have a great first movie, lets just cut our losses and remember that one, single movie and not this one. 

All in all, I give Peninsula two ghost emojis out of five. 👻👻