MeIf you had £1 for each severed neck and impaled skull in this Korean horror thriller, you’d probably have more money than the film’s entire budget. It appears that enough of the fake blood supply was spent to activate the sprinkler system on the Frontier Titan, the 58,000-ton freighter that travels between the Philippines and South Korea in Hongsong’s film.
Forget con air. This is Gong Si, where bruiser cop Suk Woo (Park Ho) is responsible for sending dozens of dirty fugitives back to their homeland. The first to be evil is Jung-doo (Seo In-guk), a rapist with boy band looks and tattoos down to his jawline, who is beaten early by Seok-woo after threatening his daughter. You don’t need a PhD in the study of his ass to speculate that a criminal hasn’t been handcuffed for a long time. However, unknown to anyone but the doctor who keeps sneaking into the basement, it’s not Frontier Titan’s only cargo. Suffice it to say that it is the action movie equivalent of the adjacent meme.
Kim sets up an early quadrangle and takeover in a sort of Black-Emeria bombshell that is becoming a lost art in Hollywood. He makes good use of the ship’s layout, but spreading the mayhem around a disaster-movie-style ensemble rather than a single protagonist means the tension is somewhat distributed. The protagonist is gratuitous carnage, already well-fed by Desperado before any third party is involved. If you’ve ever wanted to see a man beaten to death with his own arm, you’ve come to the right place.
The carnage starts to get monotonous, but the film converges in the final third as enemies, including seemingly harmless felon Doyle (Jang Dong-yoon), are able to confront the basement boy, Kim is a series of endlessly slow revelations. By then, Die Hard-style precision staging had given way to pure splatterhouse.