Time to Hunt – first look review

After a decade-long absence, South Kore­an film­mak­er Yoon Sung-hyun returns with his sec­ond fea­ture – a spo­rad­i­cal­ly riv­et­ing crime thriller that suf­fers from an over­long runtime.

Open­ing with some arrest­ing shots of a dystopi­an near-future Seoul that has been rav­aged by a finan­cial cri­sis, Yoon’s film focus­es on young Jun-seok (Lee Je-hoon) as he leaves prison and dreams of get­ting away to an idyl­lic Tai­wan beach life. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, while he was inside, the crash caused the mon­ey he’d squir­relled away with pals Jang-ho (Ahn Jae-hong) and Ki-hoon (Parasite’s Choi Woo-shik) to devalue.

With that and Sang-soo (Park Jeong-min) unable to pay him the lump sum he owed him, Jun-seok ropes them all in to rob­bing the mob casi­no where Sang-soo works. The rob­bery itself is ter­rif­i­cal­ly mount­ed and, in keep­ing with sev­er­al sequences in the film, so tense it gives Uncut Gems a run for its money.

As with any self-respect­ing heist flick, the real juice comes in the after­math. Our crim­i­nal quar­tet stole secu­ri­ty cam­era hard dri­ves that unbe­knownst to them con­tained data about VIP guests and much more vital, con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. Sang-soo sticks around, while the oth­er three say their good­byes and plan to break for Tai­wan but don’t bank on being pur­sued by mob assas­sin Han the Killer.

The sec­ond half of the film most­ly com­pris­es Han hunt­ing the three ami­gos; it’s impli­cat­ed that Sang-soo is killed by Han when the casi­no boss­es fig­ure out that he was the inside man. A grip­ping sequence in a mul­ti-storey car park con­cludes with Han for­sak­ing the mur­der of Jun-seok for his own warped per­son­al amuse­ment. Hav­ing shot Jang-ho in the trio’s lat­est get­away car, Han gives Jun-seok five min­utes to get away with his friends before track­ing him down again at a hospital.

This is eas­i­ly the strongest por­tion of the film. Extra­or­di­nary ten­sion is built up as Han prowls the cor­ri­dors and the jump-scares come thick and fast as the film’s tone shifts to hor­ror. James Cameron’s The Ter­mi­na­tor is a clear influ­ence on the action, tone and steely visu­al iden­ti­ty, though Javier Bardem’s por­tray­al of ‎hit­man Anton Chig­urh in the Coen broth­ers’ No Coun­try For Old Men is a key ref­er­ence point.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, at 134 min­utes, Time to Hunt feels at least half-an-hour too long. The result is a patchy but huge­ly enter­tain­ing film that would ben­e­fit from a nim­bler script and more scrupu­lous edit, while the super­flu­ous Tai­wan coda even sug­gests a sequel is desir­able to the film­mak­ers. Some­times it’s bet­ter to let things lie.