Ever since Timo Tjahjanto’s Indonesian ultra-violent martial arts film The Night Comes for Us released in 2018, it has seemed to loom over the genre space as the current benchmark for splatter-heavy action. When Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness released earlier this year, 2022’s top contender for the year’s bloodiest film felt unshakable. With Project Wolf Hunting, director Kim Hong-seon seems intent on claiming both spots with a single film. Indeed, one could probably count on a single hand the wounds suffered in this movie that don’t spurt geysers of crimson.
Project Wolf Hunting is the most full-tilt action bloodbath to be witnessed this side of the aforementioned Night. It begins with 47 prisoners being transported from the Philippines back to Korea, by cargo ship because the original by-plane plan was rocked by an explosion (already splashing the screen with blood and body parts in the opening). Yes, this is essentially Con Air on a prison ship, and Kim embraces and emulates that ‘90s Bruckheimer energy down to having a Tony Scott sunset shot. One shouldn’t expect the character charm or charismas of that era though. Approximately 15 minutes of Project Wolf Hunting is spent establishing the key players – the sadistic criminals led by grinning tattooed sadist Park (Seo In-guk); the isolated guards, detectives, and their hardened chief (Sung Dong-il); the…other mysterious parties onboard and corporate overseers monitoring onshore – then Kim lets the first body drop with a shattered skull and keeps the corpses piling up for two hours straight.
For its first half, Project Wolf Hunting is a succession of corridor collisions and subsequent gushes of blood that inevitably follow. While the choreography only amounts to the level of just-decent, the overkill brutality and contained chaos more than compensates with unrelenting intensity. The skirmishes of rioting crooks versus besieged guards and cops is an onslaught of teeth, fists, blunt instruments and hatchets, pistols and light-machine guns; forget about characterizations, arcs, or (or a while) even any clear protagonist. Kim gleefully treats any and all living souls as walking meat-bags to be stylishly slaughtered. Seo’s nonchalant viciousness stands out among the otherwise one-note cast of characters, but it’s hard to fault anyone when the script clearly knows that no one will survive long enough to make an impression.
At least five movies worth of plot are crammed together in a rollercoaster of developments, such that where this ends is an entirely different film from where it starts. There are even several awkwardly placed flashbacks sequences crammed with both backstory exposition and more bloodshed to up the body count. Any notion of narrative tidiness is drowned in literally gallons of blood, two-and-a-half tons of the red stuff according to the director. Despite severe plot and character deficiencies, the sheer ultra-violent action-horror momentum of Project Wolf Hunting remains electrifying fun. Oh, yes, action-horror, because there’s an arterial-gushing limb-tearing slasher flick nestled within this Con Air riff. For certain audiences, the ensuing genre-blurring carnage will either be too ridiculous to accept or act as the perfect adrenaline shot of midnight-movie madness to make gripes about narrative weaknesses melt away. In its second half, Project Wolf Hunting filters the indulgent shot-on-video splatter of the 1990s and early 2000s through the confident prism of sleek Korean spectacle.
Kim doesn’t end his film as much as stop an ongoing story in its tracks, on an abrupt sequel-bait conclusion no less. As the credits roll, this two-hour bloodbath practically feels like an extended pilot for a story very far removed from that distant “Con Air on a cargo ship” premise. Unsurprisingly, a prequel and a sequel are already in the works. And yet Project Wolf Hunting is so viscerally entertaining in its mayhem, so ruthlessly outrageous in its body-obliterating violence, so whiplash-inducing in its flurry of reveals and twists, that those plot and structural faults might just be forgotten amid the carnage.
Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment
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