User reviews

This action-packed film of non-stop double crossing was amazingly the work of a first-time feature film director, none other than lead actor Lee Jung-jae himself. Lee is a veteran leading man since the mid-90s, in acclaimed films like "The Affair" (1998), "Il Mare" (2000), "The Housemaid" (2010), "The Thieves" (2012), and "Along with the Gods" (2017, 2018). The hit Netflix series "Squid Game" (2021) made him a household name worldwide.

Lee was able to maneuver the complexity of this script (which he also co-wrote) like a pro. The story also went back and forth in time for both of the two lead characters to further elucidate (or maybe confuse) their relationship with other supporting characters (like Park's protectiveness for a certain college student) or their motivations for present actions (like Kim's experience as a soldier during the Gwangju massacre).

Lee also proved to be very adept in directing his major action scenes. Beginning from that fracas chasing the gunmen down in an American auditorium, the frenetic car chase and shootout in the streets of Tokyo after failing to secure a North Korean asset, and the climactic explosive showdown of assassins in a Bangkok palace. The way Lee executed the various scenes of violent interrogations and outright torture was realistically disturbing.

Lee Jung-jae and Jung Woo-sung have been very good friends since they were both cast in "City of the Rising Sun" in 1998. Therefore, even if they portrayed bitter rival KCIA operatives who hated each others guts, the two charismatic actors have a powerful screen chemistry together. It would seem that Director Lee allowed Jung to play the showier role of Kim. Lee made sure that even if both lead roles were flawed, you will empathize with both. You will keep hanging on undecided who the real good guy or bad guy was until the gripping finale.

Wow, this was a surprise. I knew about Lee Jung-jae's directorial debut but I thought this was an average and messy effort. At least, that was what American critics made me believe. I should know better by this time.

In fact, I didn't find the story hard to follow at all. There is a dictatorship in place. Some people are fighting and want the President and the regime down. Some in the streets, some in covert operations. At the same time, North Korea wants him down for totally different reasons. On the N. Korean side, some people believe in reunification and other people only want to erase S. Korea. Americans, as usual, try to interfere and want the President down, even if at the same time they keep the diplomatic relations. This is basically what is happening and, of course, our guys have many secrets and we are always trying to find out who they really are.

I'm a big fan of political movies that work like chess games, especially when they have a big espionage component, and loved how Lee filmed some of these scenes, reminding films like Munich when this is about spies, reminding films like V. I. P or New World when this is a full action movie.

The editing is great and it's impossible to keep quiet during that incredibly final act. The acting was outstanding as expected and I'm really curious about what Lee does next. Great debut.

Initially I find it a bit confusing and scattered as there is a huge espionage and political plot here crammed up in 2 hours. Very confusing for someone who has not much history of South Korea situation in the 1980s. I had to pause to read up before I continue with the movie. I understand the movie is fictional but based on real events. It is entertaining and full of surprises, twists, double agents, secrets but it doesn't gel properly. The acting is believable and good. Thankfully the subtitles are good too but one must read rather fast as there's lots of fast speech and action and noise. Would have scored higher if the story flow wasn't so messy.

Saw this in the cinema today. The movie is entertaining throughout, never short of action but both me and my friends are confused about the plot and what really happened. I think complicated story telling is not a good thing, it means the director has failed to explain something to the viewer. We were all not entirely sure what actually happened.

Acting was good. Action as well. You can stop reading here. And now I just have to fill up this text so that this site accepts my review which is annoying because I don't want to say so much more and you already read the important parts so that's it.

Tensions simmer on the Korean Peninsula in 1980 as a couple of lead government agents from different divisions attempt to smoke out a mole within their ranks. With infiltrators from the North, double agents, temporary alliances, repression of dissent, controlled leaks, and brutal interrogations, nothing is what it seems. Beneath the surface of all the bloodshed, payoffs, and lies, the two men nourish hope that - deep down - their goals are the same. Neither one wishes for the gruesome violence against the Korean people to continue, but the other does not know.

This is the directorial debut for Lee Jung-jae, of Squid Game fame. He was present at this Toronto International Film Festival screening and was asked why he thinks Korean culture is so popular now. "It is our mix of sorrow and joy," he said "we do emotions well." In 1980 there was a military coup in Korea and thousands of innocent people were killed in the crossfire. Like the times, the film is tense and taut with conviction and emotion. It was hard for me to follow all the changes in tone, but I was enthralled by the action. The film first appeared at Cannes and opens to wider audiences in December.

I think the story line is too complicated for a 2 hour movie, may be better for a 6 episode series so that the story can develop at a slower pace and viewers have the time to process and understand. Maybe it's ok for Koreans, but for me as a foreigner with little knowledge of their history, I find it difficult to take in the whos and whys. I have many questions while watching, why he is doing this, why he is suspecting them, etc etc.

On the whole this movie is not bad for a first time director. Action scenes and acting are great. I like the 2 male leads and other supporting actors are good too.

No pun intended - and of course this is not about hunting animals. Also it does not just have one hidden truth - there will be multiple reveals here. And the whole thing is based on history, on real events (as a friend of mine told me). Which makes it almost necessary to dig in and find out more about actual events (because as happens often, this surely has done some heightened reality, which the beginning suggest too).

The characters are well drawn, but also quite complicated. Also for people who may not watch too many Korean or Asian movies in general and have to concentrate on the subtitles, they may have some issues to distinguish the two main characters from time to time - no pun intended here either. Being confused about them may help elevate the suspense even further actually. Guessing game and all that.

Action scenes are more than well shot and the twists will keep you guessing from start to finish. Just do not expect this to ... resolve things the way you want it too. South Koread has a dark history too - they were apparently not always as free as they are now. And the movie is not shy about that fact. As it is not shy about blood and violence (good effects) ... not for the faint hearted, but really well done.

I just saw the movie "Hunt" today, Sep 6 at Major Cineplex here in Pattaya, Thailand, liking it, finding it pretty OK.

The director/lead actor Lee (Chief Park), does a pretty good for this one being his first directing job. The plot is a bit crazy, but we all know how volatile Korean politics is and has always been.

Acting is top-notch from my point of view, very believable and the torture scenes are realistic, pretty well done.

The car chases are not bad at all, well inserted and needed in the context of the story.

All-in-all, a pretty OK flick that i think you'd enjoy it, if you like spy/action movies. Enjoy, and regards from Thailand!

In "Hunt," Lee Jung-jae stars and directs this week's explosive blockbuster about double and triple crosses in a spy game between North and South Korea in the 1980s. The film is about men in well-tailored suits who must constantly determine if the armed fellow next to them is on their side or possibly fighting for the enemy. While some of the action sequences are well-staged, particularly the final explosive one, the convoluted screenplay by Jo Seung-Hee ultimately makes the film too shallow to recommend. Lee's non-stop hyperactive cutting and moving camera don't help, and the film becomes increasingly difficult to care about narratively. Although there are a couple of memorable scenes, it's impossible to even keep track of who's getting shot.

What a ride. Twists a minute, exciting action, and white knuckle tension galore. Might not be everyone's cup of tea given how breakneck the pace gets, but I enjoyed it thoroughly!

Not everything clicks though; the parts with the American dude speaking in Korean was wonky at best. Also, it does get twisty to a point where you'd need to pause it just to get a grip of who and where the chess pieces are on the board; not really a luxury to have in the cinema. A minor gripe for me.

Not a bad debut for Lee Jung Jae as director. Hope he gets to hone his skills more, because if this is his first effort then I'd be salivating at the thought of him at the height of his directorial powers.

Hunt is a gritty action packed movie. It hits the ground rolling from the very start and doesn't stop for a breather at any moment. The action scenes are all very well done and feel realistic with a lot of human emotion. The acting is very convincing as well.

Unfortunately, the story is a bit difficult to follow. Sure, it is easy to follow the over arching story but there will be moments where you are scratching your head over the intricate details.

Perhaps Hunt relied too much on action and drama, and therefore forgot to slow things down and explain to the viewers what is happening, who this character is, or what their deal is exactly.

When I sat down to watch the 2022 South Korean action thriller "Heon-Teu" (aka "Hunt"), I was expecting to be in for an intense action thriller, as the South Korean cinema usually has a tendency of doing that genre fairly well. Sure, I hadn't heard about "Heon-Teu" prior to watching it, though.

Writer Jo Seung-Hee, however, wrote a script and storyline that turned out to be rather monotonous and bland. And I have to admit that I only managed to sit through half of the 131 minutes that the movie ran for, before I gave up on the ordeal out of sheer and utter boredom. Now, it is not because there wasn't action happening in the storyline, because there was, but the storyline was just insanely monotonous and pointless, and the movie didn't really have any ups and down. And that made it feel like a flat, thrill-less ride, and I just didn't find much of any entertainment here, and thus opted to end it halfway through.

The only familiar face on the cast list, for me, was Lee Jung-Jae (who also directed the movie) in the leading role. He usually makes good and entertaining movies, but "Heon-Teu" just failed to entertain me. The acting performances in the movie were actually fair enough, despite of the narrative being so bland that it could induce sleep.

The action sequences in the movie were good, and they certainly helped to make it bearable to suffer from that monotonous and pointless script and narrative. However, it just wasn't sufficient to sustain 131 minutes of it.

I am not returning to attempt to finish watching "Heon-Teu", because the movie fell very short of entertaining me.

My rating of director Lee Jung-Jae's 2022 action thriller "Heon-Teu" lands on a three out of ten stars.

It's a good movie. The action is choreographed well, the way the intensity build up and delivered is pretty amusing. It's pretty satisfying to watch to say the least.

The story aspect is a little bit confusing tho. Not bad, but some aspect just make me frown. It's because, there's some scene that happened just a little bit too fast. I guess it happened because those scene's sandwiched between high intense scenes. And to make it worse, those thing happened when the story start to put "it's puzzle into place". To be more precise, it's when the movie start to show whose the real "bad guy" between the two agent. It just goes back and forth without adding meaningfull story.

To be honest, it doesn't ruin the whole experience tho. Because, the way the mystery unravel one by one is still surprising and satisfying. I guess the good still outweight the bad. Give it a go if you're in the mood for some action mystery stuff.

There's a point in every unfolding spy thriller where either all the seemingly disparate clues come together and the confounding series of mysteries gel into some sort of cohesive climax, or not.

"Hunt" spends a lot of effort, multi-layered political intrigue, slick choreographed action scenes, and personal character development, in a great looking slice of Korean history, which unfortunately proves way too convoluted to follow. Granted, historic scholars will have an easier time of this, but it turns out that back in the eighties the North South conflict was complicated with enough internal factions that deciphering the good guys from the bad is near impossible.

Squid Game leading man Lee Jung-Jae turns in a stellar performance as a many layered intelligent agent who is dealing with assassination attempts, possible coups, a standoffish daughter, and a competing intelligent agent who may or may not be evil incarnate. He also directs, so hands quite full.

The spy twists are many and complex, and soon become one big knot. Hard to cheer for anyone when no one is wearing white cowboy hats. A score card of who's who, and what factions are involved would be most helpful.

Best to just stop thinking and go along for the action ride, which admittedly, is really quite good.

• hipCRANK.

"Park" (director Lee Jung-Jae) and "Kim" (Jung Woo-sung) run the foreign and domestic teams of the South Korean equivalent of the CIA when an attempt is made to assassinate their President whilst on a trip to Washington DC. This politician came to power in a coup, in the 1980s, and he has no shortage of enemies. As the story develops, we discover that there is enormous pressure on these men to find out how the would-be killers knew so much about their boss's itinerary. Is there a mole - the legendary "Donglim", and could he/she have infiltrated their organisation? Pretty soon, a climate of fear and angry competition causes these two men to come to loggerheads as they try to detect the spy and keep their jobs, and they resort to ever more unscrupulous and violent means to achieve their goal before a summit in Bangkok. As is so often the case when an actor directs a film, the production can lack for an objective eye. The story really loses it's way once or twice as the investigations progress. I found it quite difficult to follow who was doing what to whom; who was on whose team and the pace was really quite sluggish at times. There is a great deal of dialogue but none of that really serves to build the characters into people in whom we could readily invest, and there are a couple of cluttering sub-plots that make little sense, or add much richness, until right at the very end. That ending has a twist that, though intriguing, is a bit contrived and I found rather implausible and I am afraid that I left the cinema underwhelmed.

Heon-teu, internationally known as Hunt, is a gritty espionage action movie inspired by actual historical events from the early eighties. The movie revolves around the steady decline of South Korea's military dictatorship throughout the eighties as Korean Central Intelligence Agency Foreign Unit chief Park Pyong-ho attemps to protect the president from assassination attempts while searching for a North Korean mole in his agency.

Most films based upon historical events tend to be boring, long and stiff. The opposite is the case here. This movie has steady pace, fascinating characters and a gripping story with multiple surprising twists and turns that will keep viewers on the edges of their seats until the credits will start rolling.

This film is Lee Jung-jae's directorial debut and he also plays the conflicted protagonist. The actor known for masterpieces such as Typhoon, The Housemaid, The Thieves, New World, Assassination, Operation Chromite, Along with the Gods and Deliver Us from Evil doesn't only live up to expectations but exceeds them because he has learnt valuable lessons from South Korea's greatest directors throughout the past three decades. This movie here features a perfect balance between intellectual depth and visually stunning action sequences that should appeal to many people. The camera work, editing and special effects have all been executed with flair and focus. Let's hope that this excellent movie is only the start for Lee Jung-jae's directorial career.

At the end of the day, anyone who likes action movies or gritty dramas should give Hunt a fair try and spread the word about this wonderful movie that deserves more international acclaim and attention. This movie goes down as one of this year's greatest films and remains entertaining even after multiple viewings. I would highly recommend this film to all my family members and friends.

By the halfway point of this Korean spy thriller, I had completely lost track of who was the "good guy" and who was the "bad guy," though it seems this confusion might be intentional. The film is filled with men in suits, constantly second-guessing whether the armed person beside them is an ally or a potential enemy. This uncertainty is at the core of the story, but for non-Korean viewers, the exposition is muddled and poorly handled right from the start.

The film barely provides any background on the sociopolitical context of the country, especially regarding the fraught history between North and South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. This lack of explanation adds further narrative incoherence for viewers unfamiliar with Korea's political landscape. What could have been an opportunity to explore the long and complex relationship between the two Koreas instead becomes a missed chance due to the film's confusing structure.

Its main weakness lies in its diffuse storytelling. The poorly defined time jumps make it hard to follow the timeline, and the constant betrayals and plot twists quickly become overwhelming, leaving the audience struggling to keep up. Without a clear narrative or context, the story falls flat, making it difficult to stay invested in the film's many twists and turns.

Hunt is a long overstuffed espionage action thriller that just stays an espionage movie on the surface, focusing more on the action thriller. This too almost work as the suspense related to Kim and Park is maintained well throughout and the reveal about both of them pays off strongly. But the screenplay remains uneven whenever the plot thickens and the drama feels overstuffed.

The North vs South Korea stuff when it comes to spy movies almost always ensures to deliver an intriguing thriller while focusing more on action. Hunt falls in the same category, firmly aided by the lead performances. But the spy game gets a bit too convoluted as the story progresses. I am not much aware of the historical accuracy at the times this movie's story is set in but nevertheless the narrative didn't alienate me.

The scenes pitting Kim and Park against each other is far more entertaining than what the two characters are made to do in the final act. This again reduces the impact of that climax. The two action blocks do stand out for all the explosive stunts.

This film was worth the wait, since I been hyped over it from seeing the trailers. And, how can you tell if a film is going to be really good is the actual intensity from the first 20 to 30 minutes which sets the tone for the rest of the film, However, I feel the cast really put in a lot of efforts into their roles in this movie, even the few scenes of dudes in the interrogation scenes were really some characters. Though, suspense is not knowing who is betraying who, who is working for which sides, and unexpected twist and turns which shocked me with the main characters. Compare to other international films, that I have seen over the years and decades, this film is absolutely sick in terms of being insanely good to watch. I was thoroughly enjoyed watching it during certain crisis in my life, this film really gassed me up and it was worth the money, time, and entertainment.

If you are well accustomed to Korean movies in general or have a fair enough idea about what you are getting yourself into, you will find yourself right at home, as this is very much akin to what South Korean thrillers usually offer: some tensed junctures, to-the-point screenwriting, fleshed out characters and then you've also got this neatly staged action that acts as the cherry on the top!

However, a lack of knowledge about the historical implications might periodically drag you down. Since the narrative is correlated with the treacherous past involving two countries, their stark differences and damaged relations.

Therefore, to fully grasp the contextual values of the writing, you would have to acquire at least a basic understanding of all the events that came about, which can be a bit of a hassle, I'm afraid.

Not their fault, though!

Lee Jung Jae did not disappoint! I never imagined a fast paced action thriller like that to be directed by a noob director. And I could never have imagined that Lee has a knack on staging amazing action scenes. It felt like watching a Hollywood movie. Despite some confusing storytelling in the beginning (or maybe because I wasn't paying much attention in the first few minutes) it's impossible to not be entertained and be engrossed by this movie. Finding Donglim isn't easy as well, you might even make a few wrong guesses yourself but unraveling Donglim isn't as shocking as watching the finale unfold before your eyes.

One of the most amazing movies of 2022. This is not your average spy thriller but a dimension beyond your highest expections. Brilliantly directed and even more powerfully presented by all the actors, especially both leads were exceptional. All things associated with the movie are just beautifully crafted, storyline, action, cinematography, acting, dialogues, music, structure and sequence. This is the nail biting spine chilling thriller you are looking for. The unique storyline separates this movie from any other spy thriller and so does the quality of acting. Honestly I was not expecting this movie to turn out this brilliant. After watching multiple korean spy thriller movies, I really have to admit that korean movie industry have nailed the spy thriller dimension and this movie is the jewel in the crown.

Lee Jung-jae's directorial debut is a fast-paced, high-stakes thriller that proves the man is a capable director as well as being a charismatic actor. He is paired with Jung Woo-sung for an intense and increasingly crazy cat'n'mouse chase for an elusive spy.

So this film begins rather chaotically, featuring two shootouts in the first half hour already, letting you know this isn't gonna be a slow-burn spy thriller. In fact, it keeps moving forward at such high speeds that you just can't catch your breath unless you take a break. It's essentially a series of confrontations (verbal and armed) that keep escalating until the rather exciting finale. Jung and Lee try to outsmart and outmaneuver each other while putting many innocent people in harm's way, which is one of the more intriguing themes in the film. They're both amoral to a certain degree, but also understanding of each other, and that lends the film a gritty Heat/Raging Fire vibe.

The plot here is concerned with a potential invasion by North Korea via a team of spies who are waiting for the right chance to strike. Lee and Jung's characters are chiefs of Domestic and Foreign Units in the KCIA, tasked with finding out the identity of one of those spies who's infiltrated in the organization. What ensues is a series of dynamic shifts in the organization and revelations that will result in a fierce battle for survival. The Jung/Lee relationship is a highlight in more dramatic scenes, with the viewer unsure who to trust as both act suspiciously throughout the film. When it comes to action (and there's a lot of it), hats off to Lee for staging some pretty intense shootouts in mostly open areas. These sequences are not terribly long, but they're expertly crafted and common throughout.

To summarize, Hunt is a very entertaining, action-packed political thriller similar to the likes of Steel Rain, but more morally ambiguous than usual in the genre. It's also convoluted and sometimes hard to follow, but never less than compelling.