Project Wolf Hunting sees criminals on a prison ship break free in the middle of the ocean. A visceral experience in every sense, Travis Johnson writes why he thinks this film’s for action fans, horror fans, and anyone wanting to see a genre flick really push the gore gag envelope.
Project Wolf Hunting
In his book Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez observed that if you’re operating outside of the mainstream you need to make the sort of movies that Hollywood would never even dream of attempting. On their album Highway to Hell, AC/DC sang “If you want blood, you’ve got it”. Now, seemingly in response to both, comes South Korean action/horror hybrid Project Wolf Hunting from director Hongsun Kim (The Chase).
The premise could not be simpler – it’s Con Air on a boat. Ship, technically; a cargo transport commandeered to take a mixed bag of dangerous fugitive criminals who have been hiding out in the Philippines back to Busan. Unsurprisingly, the criminals get loose and try to hijack the ship, staging a particularly bloody mutiny. Surprisingly, there’s something else on board, and when it breaks free it’ll show this carnival of killers what violence really is. And we are off to the races.
The film is extremely light on characterisation, to the point where most of the players on stage get a job and a distinctive look rather than anything approaching a personality. Tattooed pretty-boy killer Park Jang-du (Seo In-guk), one of the most brutal villain protagonists to come along in a while, is a standout; his highlight might be urinating on the fresh corpse of a guard he’s just slowly stabbed in the heart. Capable cop Ja-yeon (Jung So-min) seems to be our hero for a while, but taciturn prisoner Lee Do-Il (Jang Dong-yoon), who has “noble criminal with a tragic past” stamped on his forehead, gradually emerges as the key protagonist, much like Kurt Russell did in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Indeed, there’s a strong early Carpenter vibe to the whole thing; you’ll flash on Assault on Precinct 13 more than once watching this one.
Except Carpenter never had a corn syrup budget as big as this. Project Wolf Hunting is one of the gnarliest action movies to come down the pike in a good long while, and it revels in punishing the bodies of its characters. Nobody ever dies instantly in this one—they go down spurting arterial red under a flurry of blows, still twitching when they hit the deck. Jugulars are severed, skulls crushed, limbs severed. At one point a man is decapitated with a sledgehammer; another is scalped bare-handed.
Which means, of course, that Project Wolf Hunting is for a very specific audience, and that audience is comprised of people who dig fare like Timo Tjahjanto’s superb Indonesian actioner The Night Comes for Us (on Netflix, and worth your time). Tjahjanto really pushed the intensity of the gore gags with that one, and it seems Hongsun was taking notes; Project Wolf Hunting is a visceral experience in every sense.
And like the best exploitation cinema it has, if not a point, then at least a theme, tying the horror (no spoilers here) to the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century. Anyone with a passing familiarity with South Korean cinema knows that Imperial Japan serves as a go-to villain in much the same way as Nazi Germany does in American and European genre films, and with good reason.
At 122 minutes and with a few expository flashbacks slowing the roll, Project Wolf Hunting could have used a tighter edit, and anyone wanting anything other than a relentless barrage of hyper-violent action will find more sedate pleasures elsewhere. But for action fans, horror fans, and anyone wanting to see a genre flick really push the gore gag envelope: if this sounds like your kind of thing, it’s definitely your kind of thing.
