‘Project Silence’ Cannes 2023 Review: A Predictable Creature Feature
Korea has gone from strength to strength at the Cannes Film Festival. After their Palme d’Or win for Parasite in 2019, they also awarded Best Director to Park Chan-wook and Best Actor to Song Kang-ho. This year, three of the Korean films officially selected have a connection to Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 masterwork: Song Kang-ho stars in Kim Jee-woon’s Cobweb, Bong’s assistant director Jason Yu helms the sleepwalking-possession thriller Sleep, and Parasite actor Lee Sun-kyun leads both Sleep and Project Silence, the latter of which stages a Train to Busan-esque, one-location survival horror on another piece of Korea public transportation infrastructure.
Director Kim Tae-gon returns to horror for the first time since his 2009 debut The Pot, but Project Silence offers a much grander spectacle, one somewhere between creature feature and disaster film. A widowed government security official, Cha Jeong-won (Lee) is taking his young daughter to Incheon airport when a colossal pile-up on a suspension bridge leads to the escape of a pack of supercharged, military experiment dogs. They then race through the thick fog, tearing apart innocent drivers and passengers wherever possible. As the bridge threatens to collapse into the water below, our straggling survivors must get to safety. However, their mission is complicated by top secret security forces trying to eradicate all evidence of their canine project.
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Within a minute of Project Silence, you understand what broad-stroke approach it’s taking to the disaster film formula. It’s fit with multiple zany comic relief characters, tragic and contrived heroic sacrifices, and a father needing to mend a shaky relationship with his daughter (it’s nearly beat-for-beat the same as Train to Busan). Watching any disaster film from the past 30 years is enough to make you curse Roland Emmerich for his part in ensuring the genre stuck to the same thunderingly safe plotting, and Project Silence spares no expense in replicating what we’ve seen before beat-for-beat. Mileage will vary depending on how much you can stomach for 101 minutes.
As Jeong-won, Lee has a very limited range of performing modes: concern (portrayed with two or three different levels of intensity), and occasionally something grief-like when the story needs it. Still, Lee commits to the cop-but-not-a-cop type of action hero with an impressive conviction, his bassy tones and handsome face make for an enjoyable companion through the fireballs and dog attacks. (Someone needs to take this silliness seriously.)
The rest of the cast, perfectly crafted from a stock action ensemble mold, includes scrappy kids, layabout punks, and people with incredibly specific talents that only come into play during action scenes. Some, like a secret intelligence doctor, are dead on arrival, but others prove surprisingly winning. The loudest and broadest character, gas station attendant Jo Park becomes more compelling the more tied into action scenes he is, assuredly performed by Ju Ji-hoon.
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It’s a bit charming seeing a film tackle the simplest expectations of action movies with this much enthusiasm. But most of Project Silence still feels tiresome. By the midway mark, you’re desperate for something inventive, imaginative, or even ridiculous—anything that upends our predictions for where the story will follow next. But even though Project Silence bores more than roars, director Kim’s upscaling to bigger, more expensive fare isn’t a total failure.
Sure, the CG looks pretty poor (it would look a good deal worse were it not largely concealed by the pervading fog), but the action sequences have a rhythm and visual flair that injects some dynamism into the proceedings. The best sequences run rings around the tedious government espionage subplot that feels completely out of place when applied to the context of big mutant dogs. But in the final moments, when we leave the big green-screened, overly artificial bridge set and return to the natural light of outdoor locations, you realize how oppressive and muddy so much of Project Silence has looked and felt. If Cannes wants to keep up its stellar Korean momentum, it’ll need something stronger than this.
Summary
Even though Project Silence bores more than roars, director Kim’s upscaling to bigger, more expensive fare isn’t a total failure.
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