Peninsula: Inventive But Emotionally Stunted

Very early on in Yeon Sang-Ho's Peninsula, Jeong-Seok and a handful of his family members encounter a screaming family with a small girl on the roadside, begging for help. But when Jung-Seok notices blood dripping from the father, he leaves without helping. To be sure, a moment such as this is a grave spectacle, and yet it lands with a weirdly dull impact here. The burns in the screen from the opening logos had barely faded by this point, and I was given no reason at all to care for this family who hadn't been mentioned before and isn't ever mentioned again. This emotional stuntedness is one of the reasons I didn't care much for Peninsula, a sophomore slump of a spin-off following Sang-Ho's excellent Korean zombie drama Train to Busan. Peninsula doesn't understand the idea of emotional payoffs. Though I wanted to care about the raw human drama angle the movie was gunning for, it never gave me any compelling reason to. It's a drama without any gripping drama, which isn't too unlike a zoo without any animals.

To be fair to Peninsula, not everything about it is a chore to watch. The established rules of its apocalypse are consistent, and the fact that the zombies are drawn to light adds some depth to the world. I also liked its premise. Four years after a tragic turn of events, Jung-Seok now lives in a zombie-less China. A strange series of circumstances has thrown him in with a crew of thieves trying to retrieve a truck filled with $20 million US dollars somewhere on the Korean peninsula. As the kids from my day might say, a heist movie with zombies is a pretty metal concept, a refreshing departure from regular zombie fare. So it's a shame that Peninsula is so otherwise forgettable outside of its premise. The movie contains many of the elements needed to make it special - a handful of fundamentally intriguing ideas, a relatively unusual country as a setting for a zombie drama, and some morbid creativity with its worldbuilding in the form of a soggy and disgusting Mad Max-esque zombie cage battle in an old mall. But for all these great ingredients, Peninsula isn't much of a cook.

The characterization is bland and forgettable, checking off the character archetype boxes of other, far-superior dramas without bothering to play with depth, the scenery is too samey, gradually devolving into what looks like gray paint water after your kids decided to mix every color, and the passion is sorely missing from the project. As unusual as its premise may be, that's where most of the interesting things to say about Peninsula end. Like the example of the sad family I used at the start of this review, this movie should have exercised more restraint with its emotional appeals while being more liberal with its worldbuilding and scenery variety. After all, there's nothing wrong with a bit of color. Peninsula wants to show more of its zombie-ridden world than its predecessor's premise allowed, so it's a shame that there's really not that much to show.

Peninsula mixes in many of the same ingredients that worked in the first Train to Busan, primarily some intense emotional appeals. However, the new recipe is nowhere near as good as the first, and the unusual premise of a post-apocalyptic heist doesn't negate its many flaws. Peninsula tries too hard to be emotional without trying hard enough to be interesting or to do much of anything else, still managing to be bland despite its twist on a familiar genre. For a movie featuring running zombies, Peninsula is too often content to shamble.

Peninsula - 5/10

2 Corinthians 12:8-10