- Director: Sang-ho Yeon
- Writers: Sang-ho Yeon, Ryu Yong-jae
- Stars: Dong-won Gang, Jung-hyun Lee, Re Lee
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 55 minutes
Synopsis
Two men, one of whom is a soldier, a woman, and a child are driving through the woods in their car. There are already zombies about, so this isn’t Day 1. They come upon a man with a broken-down car in the road. The man is covered in blood, and they leave him and his family behind. We switch to a news program that explains that North Korea is safe, but South Korea is essentially gone. The rest of the world seems uninfected.
The group from the car boards a ship to Japan, but they learn soon that they’re being rerouted to Hong Kong; something is wrong. They find an infected person on the ship. He bites a bunch of others and the soldier’s nephew is infected. The rest of them eat his sister. After this, no other countries would accept refugees. Credits roll.
Four years pass, and we see Hong Kong. A gang brings our soldier character to see their boss. His brother-in-law has gotten into some trouble. The boss knows of a group of people going back to Korea to pick up the gold and money just laying there. There’s a literal truckload of money that the boss needs returned to him, and he offers them half to go and get it. What could go wrong?
The four Koreans take a boat to Incheon at night, and it’s a post-apocalyptic mess. All the roads (the ones they need anyway) turn out to be clear and drivable for some unexplained reason, lined with cars pulled off to the sides. They find the money truck quickly enough. Naturally, things go wrong, and they’re soon fighting for their lives. They escape, but find out that there are worse things than zombies– someone’s shooting flares to wake up the zombies.
Jung-Seok is picked up by a woman and child in an SUV, and they’ve been here a while and know what they’re really up against– atrocious CGI and bad physics. It turns out they are the family that was left in the road in the pre-credit sequence. Now there’s a grandfather, mother, and the two children, and they want to help Jung to the port.
Meanwhile, Jung’s brother-in-law is hiding in the money truck, which has been hijacked by another gang. The sergeant commands that he be put into the arena. This group was interested in the truck thinking it was full of food; they didn’t even know about the money. This is unit 631, originally sent to rescue civilians, but went native and feral instead.
In the arena, we see their version of Thunderdome, about a dozen prisoners versus more than enough zombies. Still, the brother-in-law survives the first round. Meanwhile Jung talks his group into stealing the truck back. On the other hand, Captan Seo and his henchman are already planning on driving the truck to the port and escape the country.
Jung and Min infiltrate the Captain’s compound. Captain Seo is using their last reserves of food to distract everyone from his own theft of the truck.
Soon, Jung, the Captain, Min, and the brother-in-law come together, and it’s a free-for-all in the Unit 631 compound. Jung and Min get the truck and head toward the port, but the brother-in-law is finally killed. Sergeant Hwang is soon in pursuit. There’s lots more CGI video-game driving through zombies and other cars.
There’s about full half-hour of cgi cars driving through cgi zombies with cgi bullets flying everywhere, and none of it is at all interesting because it’s all so fake looking.
Finally, they make it to the port, where they find Captain Seo waiting for them. Then they have to see if the first gang with the ship will even keep their part of the bargain…
Commentary
It’s a good concept, zombies meet Escape from New York, with a little bit of Ready Player One driving action, but it’s not terribly well done. As mentioned, the CGI is pretty bad, not even video-game worthy, and there’s a lot more people alive in the city than there has any right to be. The hardest thing to believe might be that all the roads have usable pathways on them. Who cleared the roads? Perhaps the military unit, but why so many?
There’s some gore here, and some practical-effect zombies. There are thousands of them, but mostly computer-generated and pretty fake looking. The driving stunts would be really cool if they looked at all realistic, but they don’t.
This should have been a full cartoon like the other Busan sequel (which was a prequel). There’s so much of this that’s obvious animation that they should have gone all-out and just animated the whole thing. I can usually look past CGI special effects, but this film relies on them too much– I can’t really recommend it.