Director: Lee Jong-pil
Writers: Kwon Seong-hwi, Kim Woo-geun
Stars: Lee Je-hoon, Koo Kyo-hwan, Hong Xa-bin
Synopsis: Follows the struggles of a North Korean sergeant who is chased by a ruthless major after he defects.
Lee Jong-pil’s Escape contains a premise that should be treated with the utmost seriousness, focusing on a North Korean sergeant who longs for a better life and attempts to flee the country to move to the South. In the North, their militarized future is already predetermined, no matter if they will be discharged soon. Sergeant Lim Gyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) knows he can attain a better life if he crosses the border and, as a result, has planned his escape meticulously.
However, when Kim Dong-hyuk (Hong Xa-bin), a low-ranking soldier, finds Lim’s escape plans and decides to flee, he threatens to expose the sergeant’s intentions. The two are quickly apprehended and imprisoned. Lim is freed after Kim confesses to drawing the map, and the sergeant is awarded a distinction for apprehending the defector. On the day of his discharge, however, security officer Lee Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) promotes him, thereby preventing his chance of another life away from North Korea.
There, he sets his plan of escape in motion, freeing Kim and setting a course to the South. Of course, none of it goes as planned, and he soon makes it onto Lee’s radar. A cat-and-mouse game ensues between the two as Lee closes in on Lim, who, in turn, closes in on the border between the North and South, hopefully setting a course for freedom.
The tension between the sergeant who wakes up from the radicalization of living in such a repressive country and understands that the only way he can live a fulfilling life is by escaping and the radicalized security officer who will stop at nothing to capture and kill his friend should be at the front and center of the picture. Unfortunately, Jong-pil frequently distracts himself with sub-arcs that go virtually nowhere and attempts to add comedy to the situation when Lim’s path to freedom is a literal matter of life and death.
Yes, there’s a slapstick sequence in which Lim steals the car of a drunk general, whom he pretends to carry home, only for him to leave the general stranded. Or when he has his ‘Tom Cruise’ moment, putting on Ray Ban sunglasses to convince another general he’s on a classified mission. Perhaps adding levity to the proceedings would be appropriate if we weren’t talking about North Korea and treated the story in a fictionalized country. But the comedy here feels misplaced and dilutes the emotional impact of Lim’s plea for freedom.
Then there’s the attempt to add more depth to the protagonists through fragmented flashback scenes that serve very little to feed into the internal conflict boiling into Lim or a past relationship between Lee and Seon Woo-min (Song Kang) when the two were in Russia. While this piece of information adds a layer to our understanding of Lee’s repressed emotions (as he tries to keep his sexual orientation a secret), it belongs in a completely different movie since this flashback isn’t about the two friends, whose arc seems far more queer-coded than the actual queer relationship between Lee and another male character who only appears in three brief scenes, never to be seen again beyond a not-so-subtle hint to confirm something going on within Lee’s psyche.
These two distractions undermine the story’s seriousness. Still, it isn’t helped when the film contains underwritten and underdeveloped protagonists (whether leading or supporting the film) and antagonists. At some point, Lim and Kim meet a group of nomads looking for a prisoner. A massive action set piece ensues, which looks great but is nowhere near as impressive as it should be, and the characters who help them out disappear from the picture almost as soon as they are introduced, with little to no resolution in their arc.
It should be worth mentioning that the film’s cinematography loves to play with light and subdued colors, which gives it a striking palette during its action sequences. However, the cat-and-mouse scenario quickly becomes mind-numbing since Jong-pil never fills in the gaps on the characters beyond fragmented flashbacks that feel misplaced and add unneeded layers to the protagonists instead of focusing on Lim’s quest for freedom and Lee furthering down the rabbit hole of radicalization to repress his innate feelings. This should be at the film’s heart, especially when Je-hoon and Kyo-hwan give gripping turns, even if their characters aren’t fully realized on screen.
As a result, Escape can’t impress, even if Jong-pil tries to visually dazzle with a fast-paced and almost relentless barrage of action. However, barely anything works since the characters are poorly written and severely misguided. Attempts at making its story serious fall flat when Jong-pil adds comedy to the mix, even if its ending leaves room for a more hopeful and free future. Perhaps it could’ve been worthwhile if it cared about its protagonists beyond the limited flashbacks it gave them and would begin to develop their arc in the present moment. Unfortunately, Escape fails their characters and, in turn, the audience into investing their time into a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse that is truthfully hollow and tiresome.
