Oct 022016
 
two reels

The zombie apocalypse breaks out just as a workaholic is boarding a train to take the daughter he’s been ignoring back to his ex-wife in Busan. With zombies onboard, our not-so-noble hero ends up with a tough guy and his very pregnant wife, a teen baseball player and cheerleader, a homeless man, and two elderly sisters, all trying to survive. There’s also an evil businessman, because there always is one in zombie movies.

With all the hype I expected a lot more from Train to Busan. It’s not a bad film and in the rankings of zombie flicks, it’s in the upper half. It’s well directed and acted, with a budget that says “theater” instead of “home video.” But I’ve seen it all before many times over. There’s nothing new here. There isn’t even a fresh take on something old. Zombies chase. People run. People fight. People die. People do something really selfish or stupid, and then die. In 1977 this would have been hot stuff, but now it is pretty dull. Even the simple, half-baked social commentary is stale and nothing Romero didn’t do better, smarter, and more enjoyably thirty years ago. Of course Train to Busan is doing more than imitating Romero. It’s also imitating 28 Days Later and shoveling wholesale from World War Z.

The characters are what you expect. They act as you know they will. They learn the lesson you’ve seen them learn before. And they die, in order, as specified by earlier films. They meant nothing to me, partly due to them being unpleasant and stupid, but mainly because I already knew them all and have seen them die.  If you are less annoyed by repetition and cardboard cutouts, you may warm to them more than I did.

Korean horror films tend to be more melodramatic than Western ones, and zombie films tend in that direction anyway, so Train to Busan gives us non-stop emoting turned up to eleven. If you want loud crying, long intense staring, and cup-fulls of saccharine, Train to Busan delivers. The requisite (for Korean horror) “Gosh, I love my child” moment is a bridge too far for anyone, but it was prefaced by a zombie fight so that might lessen the string for you.

While there is nothing new here, nor anything interesting, it is a well done version of the same-old-same-old. I can name a dozen zombie films that do everything Train to Busan does, and do it better, but you may have seen those already. So if you are looking for more of the same, this may be just the ticket. For me, I just wanted them all to get to it and die.