‘Hope’ Review: Great promise spoiled by the story, leaving behind a wreckage as glorious as it is ruinous

Experiencing a movie as uniquely polarized as Hope left me speechless, and not in a good way. The film is exceptional in that it showcases some of the most breathtaking action I have ever witnessed, sharply contrasted by one of the absolute worst stories in recent memory. Many viewers will say the spectacle more than makes up for such a severe narrative deficit; I will not be one of them. While I can understand the perspective, the story is simultaneously extremely generic and totally incomprehensible. By the end of it all, I was left entirely baffled and dumbfounded, not only because I could not understand a single thing that had just happened, but also as to how such a massive production with this much potential could be so structurally broken.

Even with my very mixed feelings on Hope, I have to hand it to director Na Hong-jin and the brilliant South Korean talent behind the camera–they really know how to shoot a movie and inject visual storytelling into it. The tension that builds from the start in the town of Hope Harbor as events quickly escalate is captured immaculately. As the mystery behind the animal mutilations unfolds, the sense of urgency rapidly ratchets up. The suspense is handled masterfully, and the monster is excellently teased, leaving the audience craving to see what it is.

When the chaos finally erupts, each massive set-piece becomes the definition of propulsive, adrenaline-fueled, enthralling filmmaking. The camerawork is the undisputed highlight; the frantic blocking and fluid tracking shots weave through the action spectacularly, placing the audience right in the middle of everything. A great score, sound design, and overall production scale enhance the choreography. There is even a vehicle chase sequence near the end that puts the one in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to shame.

Once the action gets going, there is only one other major hindrance to Hope besides its story: the actual monsters themselves. I say that in the plural because there is more than one, although that is only a minor spoiler. The problem with them goes beyond their general appearance; I could have gotten past the generic design if it weren’t for the awful visual effects. These creatures are incredibly fake-looking, tarnished further by the horrible computer-generated movement given to them.

The result made me feel like I was watching a low-resolution video game from a retro console, because the monsters always feel misplaced in every environment and action they take. It also does not help that they all move at super speed while somehow never catching the people they are chasing. But even if you can get past these effects and immerse yourself fully into the bombastic splendor of it all, at the end of the day, it’s like beautifully decorating a cake with alluring frosting and icing, only to realize when you bite into it that it is not a cake, but instead hot garbage. That is the outcome Hope provides because of its nonsensical story.

This failure becomes clear in the second act, as this is where the wheels begin to fall off. First, the pacing comes to a dead halt and drags, providing the first clear indication of the film’s bloated 2-hour-and-37-minute runtime. During this stretch, the movie constantly jumps back and forth between different plot threads, introducing new discoveries that make zero sense when put together. The original storyline established in the first act is completely abandoned in favor of a new threat that simply does not compute with what came before.

By the time the third act arrives, it’s all noise with no substance whatsoever. Forget character arcs; the focus shifts entirely to the action, which quickly begins to feel repetitive at certain points with all the CGI carnage and gunfire, losing a bit of the stakes that made the earlier portions so engaging. Then, the last 5 to 10 minutes are egregiously bad and confusing. Because of the disjointed story and its erratic, convoluted leaps–which cause a complete lack of cohesiveness, despite the film’s clear intention for the audience to follow along–things really drop off a cliff. I know I have said this already, but nothing makes sense. A final bizarre cliffhanger solidified things for me: this is one of the worst stories put to the big screen.

But while I specify that the story is awful, I am not exactly referring to the script in its entirety. Sure, it could have been at least 20 minutes shorter and has a bad narrative dictating its direction, as I said, but when you break things down all the way to the individual lines of dialogue, the characters click, and the scenes flow well. While the writing side of Na Hong-jin has no idea how to structure a plot, he does know how to write good character interactions and exchanges. This is a very funny movie, and I was impressed that the moment-to-moment experience could be kept so entertaining despite the previously discussed nonsense hanging over it.

Hope is a weird film to give a verdict on, because the action is so good that it’s worth seeing simply for that aspect alone; that is where all the enjoyment comes from–everything about it is bonkers and rips. The action is brutal, the fatalities are jaw-dropping, and the performances are incredible in the way they bring so much energy and vigor to the final product.

It all really goes to show how a ludicrous, incoherent, and overall crappy story can sink a ship with not only a lot of promise, but a lot of that promise actually realized. The movie honestly would have been better off not even attempting to tell a story given the circumstances–keeping it as a high-octane action-thriller-comedy monster production without throwing caution to the wind regarding a narrative at all would have made this a solid B-level popcorn movie at the least (improving the visual effects would have also helped). Instead, we got this inexplicable jumbled mess.

If you do not care about any of my criticisms, you will love this, and if you do, you will hate it. It is hard to find a real landing point on how I even feel about it on the whole. Thus, I will put it this way: the action is an A, but the story is an F, so let’s average it out and call Hope a…