My friend Chris asked me if I was going to see Hope this weekend. I had no idea what it was. He sent me a link, which introduced me to this Korean action/sci-fi/monster movie. I also heard some chatter about how wild this movie was, so when I saw the film available at Cinemark, it moved up my list.

Wild is not the appropriate descriptor for the film.

According to IMDB, “A mysterious discovery is made on the outskirts of the remote harbor town. The residents find themselves in a desperate fight for survival against something they have never encountered before.“

The movie starts off with the Chief of Police (Hwang Jung-min) getting called by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to investigate a dead cow on the road that had gaping claw wounds on its body. This led to a pursuit of some kind of monster that is rampaging through the heart of the small town.

Another character that I enjoyed a great deal in this movie was Im Sung-ae, who was played by Jung Ho-yeon- one of the stars of the first season of Squid Game.

The first act of this movie is basically the monster and Chief going through the city and it was tremendous. There were so many epic action moments that were amazingly shot. Some of the CGI was a touch shaky, but there were also some awesome CGI as well. There were no moments of bad CGI that took me out of the movie.

There was a switch along the line when we discover something unexpected and it changes the perspective. It is still some greatness, as there are a ton of great action chases and exciting, thrill ride scenes.

There were some extremely funny scenes too. Especially some of the dialogue of the film was hilarious and my entire theater was laughing at it.

Hope, though I am not sure where that name comes from, is so great for most of this movie that the long run time of over two and a half hours did not feel that way for me. I really was considering this being the second 5 star review of the day.

However, without spoiling anything, the ending of this movie dropped a gigantic HUH??? on the audience and came from out of nowhere. I was totally confused at the end of the film, and it hurt a film that I thought was superb so far. It felt like the film was incomplete. It does sound like they are working on the sequel.

As with any foreign language film, I forgot the fact that I was reading the English dub on the screen as the film progressed. It just becomes part of the experience. I prefer reading the subtitles over having English actors dub the words because the performances always seem to suffer in that way. The tone of voices is as important as the words that they are saying.

This was a lot of fun even though the ending dinged it. It is a bat-shit crazy film that flipped the script a couple of times and kept me tense and anxious the whole time.

4.5 stars