Last week, Warner Brothers finally postponed Tenet, the big-budget Christopher Nolan sci-fi action picture, indefinitely. And with that, the Hollywood summer of 2020 was officially over. While the summer movie season this year didn't look that great to begin with, we did miss out on Top Gun 2 (oh, God, why?), another Fast & Furious film (is this like #12 or something ridiculous? Do people not have new ideas?), a Wonder Woman sequel set in 1984 for some reason and starring a villain that's a cheetah played by Kristen Wiig (no...not making that up), and Marvel's annual, big, dumb, instant-money printing machine blockbuster, Black Widow, that, honestly, nobody ever wanted to see in the first place. Every movie was postponed to either later in the year or next year except for Tenet. Christopher Nolan had written an op-ed in the LA Times back in March proclaiming that we need to help movie theater owners out...so Warner Brothers kind of half-heartedly kept Tenet on the schedule for July 14th. Then the corona virus never went away and then got worse and worse so Tenet was moved to the end of July and then to a Wednesday in August and then, finally, was just taken off the schedule and will be released eventually, sometime, who-the-fuck-knows when. What will probably happen is it will open in other countries first because a)movies tend to make a lot of money in countries like China and b)the U.S. has one of the worst cases of the corona virus thanks to many factors including a)a dumb president, b)dumb governors, and c)dumb citizens. It's already July 27th and we kind of already realized that going to movie theaters in 2020 was a no-go since March when the new James Bond movie was pushed all the way from April to Thanksgiving and A Quiet Place 2, the year's first probably mega-hit set to be released on March 17th, was postponed until September 5th (since then it's been moved to 2021). Movies didn't go away of course. Every week new movies come out On Demand, some that were supposed to be released in theaters, some that just were meant for home viewing all along. And some were fantastic, like Andy Samberg's Palm Springs and Pete Davidson's The King of Staten Island. Others were duds, like Tom Hank's Greyhound. But what we all want is that big, summer, popcorn movie, right? A huge, brain dead, big budget spectacle that cost millions to make and is chock full of special f/x and you go see it on a Friday night with a packed house and it's a hell of a good time. Is that...lost? Apparently not, because Peninsula, the sequel to the smash hit South Korean zombie picture, Train to Busan, opened in theaters last week somewhere and it's already a major hit. It's action packed, filled to the brim with special f/x, is super dumb, super entertaining, and is pretty much a mash-up of Escape from New York and The Walking Dead. Fuck. Sign me up.
Peninsula has already made $26.5 million total and has made $20 million in South Korea. To put that in perspective, the U.S.'s #1 movie of this past weekend, Dave Franco's semi-entertaining slasher pic, The Rental, made a whopping $400,000 from 251 theaters (most of them are drive-in theaters I'm assuming...as the only theater I know open and playing it is the drive in near Scranton). This means that on the other side of the world there was a presumably packed Friday night showing of Peninsula where people were enjoying their summer popcorn extravaganza experience. Those bastards.
And maybe that's one reason why I loved Peninsula...because I'm going through summer movie season withdrawal. Because Peninsula is certainly not a great movie or great work of art. Nope, it's a big, dumb popcorn film that's pure entertainment and nothing else. Story? Characters? Great dialogue? Who needs 'em when you've got a twenty minute chase sequence through a Korean city while plowing through herds of zombies? Did I also mention that this film has a gladiator/cage match sequence with prisoners verse zombies? Could this film get any cooler?
Train to Busan was a huge South Korean hit...so much so that it made a lot of money worldwide and is still mentioned online when websites mention "The Best Foreign Films on Netflix" or whatever the eye-catching headline is that day. It came out during the zombie craze, back when The Walking Dead was the #1 show on cable. Train to Busan was basically a zombie action movie that was set mostly on a train. It was so great that I vaguely even remember what happened or who was in it or how it ended. Peninsula is a sequel but it takes place 4 years later so it has an all new cast and a new plot. Four years later, South Korea is a walled off, quarantined peninsula where zombies roam free and supposedly no humans are left. A few Koreans that got out decide for some reason to take up a gangster's plan to go into the quarantined country to get a million bucks that has been sitting in a truck for four years. Of course when they get there they find out that there are people still trapped inside and fending for their lives and living like it's Mad Max: Thunderdome. There's a gang of evil, seedy men that have a compound in the city and enjoy their nights watching cage fights between men and zombies. There's also children that can drive cars like they just watched Baby Driver...which makes no sense considering the highways are filled with abandoned cars and, well, zombies. How could you drive ten feet let alone be involved in a twenty minute car chase? Logic is not this film's strong suit. Sang-ho Yeon, who also directed the original and directed and co-wrote Peninsula, knows how to entertain, though, which certainly helps a film with some truly lame sap. I truly had no idea what this sequel would be like once I started watching it, but the idea they came up with is fantastic. Yes, it rips off Escape from New York and Mad Max and World War Z and just about everything ever but it's wildly entertaining and super engrossing. Kim Min-Jae, as the crazy, evil soldier, gives a ridiculously crazy over the top performance as well.
This might not be great, memorable, anything new, fresh, or brilliant...but it's the only summer movie popcorn film we got...and thankfully it's a wild fucking ride. ***
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