2 out of 5

Directed: Kim Hong-seon

Project Wolf Hunting is essentially a two hour example of the law of diminishing returns. You can certainly use some kind of shocking initial sequence to set a tone, or to give a starting point for how things might ramp up, but PWH’s go-to gore gag of smashing someone in the face / stabbing them in the neck and having them splash gallons of blood everywhere only sets a tone in the sense that you should prepare to see this same thing done again, and again; and in that sense certainly fails to ramp up: it’s just the same, level road throughout.

That the first instance of this also comes after an introductory sequence featuring a police officer beating a criminal only helps to cue us in that we’re dealing with unlikeables fighting unlikeables, which is all well and good as a free pass for some mayhem, but see above on that lacking ‘mayhem’: it’s rather just removing any and all stakes from who wins or loses.

Project Wolf Hunting pitches a scenario where a bundle of notorious killers are to be extradited from the Philipines to South Korea by boat; monitoring this ship is a bundle of tuff cop types, with at least one call out cop – played by Jung So-min – who refrains from doing all that typical tuff cop rough-’em-up stuff, and so becomes something of a protagonist for the audience to watch. Soon into the travels, the ship’s doctor (Lee Sung-wook) sneaks off to check on a mysterious patient being monitored in the lower levels, and some of the cooks and cleaners on board start sneaking around as well, ascending on a cache of weapons they’ve stowed away. Communications with the outside world go dark, and an outbreak begins, with tons and tons of those blood-‘splosion sequences. This builds to a fever pitch of deaths – I’ll credit PWH with not being precious with its leads – and then that mysterious patient makes their presence known. …And then there’re more ‘splosions.

While there’s some aesthetic fun to how blood-drenched the movie quickly becomes and frequently is, it’s a shtick that simply has no escalation. There are a couple of amusing gags with severed limbs later on, but otherwise, though there are good production values for crafting the spaces and rooms for fights, and the large cast is juggled pretty effectively, the gore feels kind of cheap – whatever complexity might’ve been there ends up being seen as people just smeared with red. It’s tiresome. This is even more the case when patient “Alpha” comes into the mix, as we’ve already seen the level of violence to which the flick commits, and Alpha doesn’t change that at all.

The movie waits a bit longer to start dropping explanatory plot points, with the momentum acceptably carrying us to that point, but then this suffers a same Is That It? fate: the lazy “read the top secret documents” exposition moment is pretty unnecessary, as this all falls in to a conspiratorial story structure we’ve seen a million times over.

Project Wolf Hunting is, at least, not boring, but it’s not at all grabbing, either. I found I was able to drift in and out without much concern, my video staying paused on a frame of seemingly crazy carnage that’s ultimately rather ho-hum.