Peninsula (or the US release title Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) is a largely in-name-only sequel to the excellent Train to Busan. Train was a zombie film that somehow made the zombie film fresh again. Not so this loud, bombastic action movie dressed up as a sequel.
Peninsula is set in the same universe as Train to Busan. It’s four years after the zombie apocalypse and we learn the outbreak was isolated to the now-quarantined Korean peninsula. The surviving Koreans who managed to escape are now stigmatized homeless refugees mostly living on the streets of Hong Kong. A gangster hires a team of survivors to return to the peninsula to retrieve duffel-bags full of US money that didn’t make it out of the city in time. So our heroes enter the city and face hordes of the undead and survivors.
The intro sequence, set during the original outbreak, gave me hope this would be a good sequel. It was fairly exciting and seemed to get what Train to Busan was about. And the final action set piece, while a little too long, had heart. So the beginning was strong, the end was moderately strong and the middle just mush.
The majority of this movie is a repetitive, unimaginative zombie apocalypse action movie. The heroes and villainous human survivors battle it out over the money while zombies keep getting in the way. There are some decent individual action moments that kept making me hope the film was picking up, but it didn’t. It remained a poorly directed action flick of the modest of orders. Most of which is sandwiched between Mad Max-style chase sequences where CGI cars Fast and Furious their way through CGI city streets while being chased or crashed into by CGI zombie hordes. A little of that bombastic noise went a long, long way… and then kept driving.
The CGI of the abandoned and ruined city is dodgy at best, made palatable only because the movie is pure pulp. By any other metrics, it’d be unacceptable. Not to mention the cars have no reality, no weight, and certainly no physics.
The movie just isn’t a sequel to a great horror flick nor is it even a horror movie at all. Setting aside my disappointment that this wasn’t what I hoped for, it still doesn’t work on its own. It’s pure action noise with very little characterization or humanity. The solid intro and end save the movie only by the skin of its rotting teeth.
Score: 66