Psychokinesis

On the strength of Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan, a taut and ingeniously staged zombie thriller, I watched that director's made-for-Netflix Psychokinesis (2018).  Don't bother.  Psychokinesis is an incoherent mess that's awful on pretty much all levels.  The film is interesting, however, because it is an ambitious failure -- the picture collapses not because its generic or slovenly; rather, the problem with Psychokinesis is that it's too complex and all-encompassing for its premise and goes off in all directions.  Wildly uneven, the film tries to be a comedy, a superhero picture, a poignant family drama, and a bitter social critique.  It doesn't succeed with any of these objectives, but, at least, dies trying.

There's a nasty edge of Korean extremism in the film.  Squatters inhabit a ruinous slum scheduled for destruction to clear a way for a shopping mall.   The villainous Taesan Corporation sends an army of thugs wearing white hard-hats to terrorize a young woman who operates a fried chicken place in the slum.  In the fighting, the young woman's mother gets dropped head-first on a curb and dies.  (Everyone seems to accept the premise that urban renewal involves rioting, severe beatings with clubs and truncheons, much hurling of Molotov cocktails, and general mayhem.)  The girl's father, with whom she is estranged, is a low-grade security guard at a local hospital, addicted to stealing toilet paper and other small amenities from his employer.  He lives in a filthy apartment and seems generally inept and hapless.  However, when he drinks from spring water contaminated by a mysterious blue fluid leaking from a meteorite, he acquires super-powers:  he is telekinetic and can levitate objects and hurl them around.  The next time the thugs attack his daughter and their friends, the super-hero comes to the rescue -- still inept in the exercise of his powers, he manages to throw the bad guys around, blasting them through walls and sending them sprawling.  The chief bad guy reports to his boss, a weirdly perky and sarcastic girl, who has another woman deliver a savage beating to him while she chirps non sequiturs.  This sets up the big climax, an extended battle between the corporation's goons and the squatters.  The young woman's father levitates himself and flies to the rescue, smashing into buildings and crashing repeatedly.  At the battle, he destroys the Taesan army and, then, turns  himself in to be imprisoned for four years for his role in the riot.  Emerging from jail, he finds that Taesan overextended itself, has filed bankruptcy, and that there is just a big vacant lot where the slum once was located.  His daughter is prospering selling fried chicken under a neon logo of her super-hero father:  the name of her business is "Superpower Chicken".

The movie is weird mélange of comedy and intense violence.  Everyone assumes that the government is completely corrupt and complicit with the construction company -- but this being South Korea, everyone is also oddly inept and befuddled; evil is self-limiting because of its extreme stupidity.  Conversely, good can't exactly ride to the rescue because it is equally dim-witted.  It is assumed that disputes will be solved by battles between club-wielding mobs against the flames wrought by Molotov cocktails.  As in Train to Busan, the director shows a facility for staging sieges -- in this case, hordes of riot police trying to batter down doors held fast against them by the beleaguered squatters.  Similarly, as in the much better zombie picture, the film exploits the notion of the negligent, absent father who becomes a hero to his daughter -- it's not clear to me whether this is a particularly Korean plot point or just a result of the success of the Die Hard pictures in southeast Asia.  The acting in this film is cartoonish and bizarre -- the scene in which the ultra-cute and preppy mob-boss girl has her subordinate thrashed is inexplicably strange.  Everything is shot with the kind of nonchalance and aplomb that HD digital allows and some of the scenes seem simply "too easy" in the way that they are staged and cut -- that is, the director opts for the cheapest and simplest (that is, most generic) solutions.  The mechanism by which the hero acquires his superpowers is risibly stupid.  But, on another level, it's a big movie, staged with hundreds of extras on a vast set, a maze of barricades and crumbling walls and garbage dumps, at the climax lit by large fires.  This picture is a mess, but I predict that the director's next film will be some kind of masterpiece.