Director/Screenplay – Kim Hong-seon, Producer – Gu Seong-mok, Photography – Yoon Ju-hwan, Music – Jo Ran & Kim Jun-sung. Production Company – Contents G/Cheum Film.
Cast
Seo In-guk (Park Jong-doo), Jang Dong-yoon (Lee Do-il), Choi Gwi-hwa (Alpha), Park Ho-san (Lee Seok-woo), Jung So-min (Lee Da-yeo), Ko Chang-seok (Go Kun-bae), Jang Young-nam (Choi Myeong-ju), Sung Dong-il (Oh Dae-woong), Son Jong-hak (Soo-cheol), Lee Sung-wook (Kyung-ho), Hong Ji-yoon (Song Ji-eun), Jung Moon-sung (Kyu-tae)
Plot
Efforts are made to ship a group of wanted criminals back to South Korea from where they have fled to the Philippines. The first attempt to do so was cut short when a member of the public detonated a suicide bomb outside the airport terminal. It is decided this time they will be shipped via by sea aboard the cargo ship Frontier Titan. The prisoners are brought on board, to be kept cuffed up throughout the journey while guarded by a detail made of the toughest police officers. The multiple murderer Park Jong-doo has hidden a lock pick in his mouth and breaks himself free just as a group of associates who have snuck aboard start killing the police and free all the prisoners. Also aboard is Alpha, the hulking result of a wartime Japanese experiment to create a super-soldier that resulted in something invincible that indiscriminately killed everything in its way. Alpha gets free and begins slaughtering everybody aboard the ship, forcing the criminals and police to cooperate for their mutual survival.
Project Wolf Hunting was the fifth film for South Korean director/writer Kim Hong-seon who had previously made the likes of the heist film The Con Artists (2015), the swordsman film The Age of Blood (2017), the crime thriller The Chase (2020) and the horror film Metamorphosis (2020).
The South Korean crime film and action film has become a genre unto itself since the early 2000s. For a good half of its running time, Project Wolf Hunting gives the impression that it is another film in this vein. It has a solid set-up for such a film – cops are tasked with shipping a group of hardened criminals back to Busan aboard a cargo vessel during which the criminals manage to escape and arm themselves. Brutal bloodthirsty combat and heavy gunfire ensues as everyone tries to survive while contained on board the vessel at sea. Indeed, it would not be hard to build an entire film out of the initial set-up alone without the need for any fantastic elements.
About halfway through, the film unleashes its monster – a giant, hulking humanoid with its eye cavities sewn shut with sutures. It is not until about three-quarters of the way through before we get an explanation of what it is – a Frankenstein-ian creation that was part of a Wartime Japanese Super-Soldier program that promptly went amok and turned into a mindless killing machine that eliminated everybody irrespective of what side they were on.
Prison breakout aboard the ship led by the psychopathic Seo In-guk (front left)
Project Wolf Hunting proves one of the most brutally violent and blood-drenched films that one has seen in recent memory – no matter whether it is cops and escaped criminals fighting it out or the monster massacring everybody. We see people stabbed, throats slit, heads bashed into walls or splattered with bullets. The blood flows in rivers. And then once the Alpha enters the fray, this goes to something next level with chests ripped open, slit throats and severed heads. It is so excessively piled on it becomes its own artform.
Kim Hong-seon’s direction of all this is tight, unsentimental and urgent, even if ultimately there is never too much more to the film beyond its parade of gore-drenched despatches. Particularly good amid the cast is Seo In-guk who does gleeful madness well and gives a captivatingly psychopathic performance.
