Have you ever watched one of those lone wolf vigilante films starring, say, Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson, or Denzel Washington and found yourself rooting for the bad guys? I suppose we don’t really want the criminals who kidnap a daughter to get away with it, but … what if their offenses are something less? Like guys just out to make a political statement or steal from the mob? Could you root for those guys while John Wick is shooting up the place? Time to Hunt puts you in the shoes of the hunted rather than the hunter. It’s not necessarily a unique perspective, but it certainly is road-less-traveled material.
Oh, yes, I forgot, this is another dystopian future. This version of our inevitable bleak comes Korean style, where BTS is now a bunch of grifting punks. Jun-seok (Lee Jehoon) gets out of a prison stint where he was the fall guy for his posse only to discover their “big” score won’t last the week. The weakest member of the gang works as a roulette caddy in the local casino, so the boys get the bright idea to rob the place, find an island (Taiwan, maybe), set up shop, and never leave. It’s the same dream Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal share in Running Scared.
The problem here is that dystopian BTS is rank amateurs … and while they do get away with a minor score, the casino owners unleash Han (Hae-soo Park) a cold-blooded killing machine. We know from the outset this ain’t a fair fight. It’s like sending a Terminator after the cast of “Saved by the Bell.” Come to think of it, I’d watch that; I’d watch that on pay-per-view, but only if it were real.
Time to Hunt is sort of a bell curve film – the beginning and ending are both uninspired. While I cared for their plight, I didn’t care much for the kids; they seemed the kind who would probably be lawless even were
there not a dystopia going on. That doesn’t make them necessarily unlikable; but it make it more difficult for me to sympathize with them when they so optimistically choose the suicidal path of stealing from the mob. In the middle of the film however, there is an engaging thriller so tense it almost qualifies as horror. Han doesn’t just have ice water in his veins; he has a freaking glacier. He cares nothing for anything other than the hunt, which makes him an ideal killer. At that point, I’m all in for the rabbits; I know they won’t escape … well not at least until the bloated 134 minute run-time expires.
This film will neither detract nor add to our current entertainment love affair with South Korea. It’s good, but not great, and a little long. I suppose it’s not fair to compare our “heroes” here with BTS, but they really do look like a K-pop boy band. And I kept wondering of their robbery was going to break into a music video.
This South Korean future looks gray
Even the teens have no place to play
Which vocation to drop …
Grand theft or K-pop?
It really could go either way
Rated TV-MA, 134 Minutes
Director: Sung-hyun Yoon
Writer: Sung-hyun Yoon
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Rabbits
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Wolves
