ESCAPE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Escape, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 4, 2024

Escape follows a North Korean soldier on an increasingly ludicrous path to defect to South Korea. As directed by Lee Jong-pil, the movie possesses a strong sense of momentum as the stakes and obstacles escalate for our desperate protagonist. While that certainly means something in a non-stop thriller such as this, it's not enough to overshadow just how contrived this character's journey becomes.

Our man is Sgt. Lim Gyu-nam, currently stationed along the demilitarized zone of the Korean Peninsula under the authoritarian rule of the north. Gyu-nam has served in the military for a decade and is preparing to be discharged from the service, but whatever life might be waiting for him here cannot be tolerated.

Instead, he has been spending his nights sneaking out of the barracks and tracing a path south. There are watchtowers with attentive guards. There's a line of barbed-wire fence. Past those is a minefield with explosives buried beneath the dirt and spread at random intervals across miles.

The movie finds Guy-nam in the final stages of his preparation to get to the demarcation line, the official border between North Korea and South Korea, and beyond—to a new life of freedom in the neighboring country. Lee only hints at the meticulous process his protagonist has taken to get to this point, but as we watch him—crawling prone on the ground, testing the dirt with bamboo shoots to find the metallic clink of mines, marking each explosive he finds with a stick and on his map—here, the task immediately feels overwhelming, while Guy-nam's determination and patience are self-evident.

This, apparently, isn't enough for screenwriters Kwon Sung-hui and Kim Woo-geun, who quickly throw more and more complications into Gyu-nam's plan. They never stop, actually, until the very final moments of the plot, and by that conclusion, the story is exhausting as much for just how much external stuff is thrown at the man as it is for our sympathy for how much he has to go through to get where he does. There's probably a more grounded version of this plot to be made—maybe one that sees its freedom-seeking protagonist as more than a pawn in an elaborate string of hurdles. However, that's another conversation to have another day when that version hopefully arrives.

This movie's obstacles begin cleverly and with some moral weight, at least. Guy-nam's plan is found out by another soldier named Dong-hyuk (Hong Xa-bin), who wants to join his comrade in defecting and wants to leave sooner than Guy-nam originally planned. When Guy-nam is hesitant about bringing his fellow soldier along and enacting his escape plan sooner, Dong-hyuk takes it upon himself to go on his own, leading to the base being put on alert, Guy-nam finding him, and the two men being accused of desertion—the penalty for which is death by firing squad.

Guy-nam is saved through the intervention of Hyun-san (Koo Kyo-hwan), an officer with State Security who was childhood friends with the soldier and convinces everyone that Guy-nam is a hero who stopped a deserter. With him being brought miles upon miles from the beginning of his escape roue and Dong-hyuk to be executed, Guy-nam must sneak out of a banquet in his honor, find his way back to the base, and rescue the doomed soldier.

If the original plan seemed difficult, this new one, being made up as Guy-nam goes, seems nearly impossible by comparison. The filmmakers have some fun—a questionable notion in the first place, given that a pair of lives on the line and against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime—coming up with ways for Guy-nam to improvise his way out of the party in his honor—forging a pass to the demarcation line, stealing a jeep, using a drunken and passed-out State Security official as passenger so that no one asks any questions. Once he's out in the open, Guy-nam must lie his way through a series of high-ranking officers, deceive some more whenever someone questions his credentials, and evade Hyun-san, who's ready to kill Guy-nam for betraying him and anyone else who might report his own error in judgment about the deserter.

The resulting plot is an extended chase, as the State Security officer—with an entire military division backing him up, which kind of contradicts his goal to keep the matter quiet—pursues Guy-nam, with sequences of cat-and-mouse games breaking up the driving, running, and shooting. Individually, some of these scenes are smartly staged, such as Hyun-san using the ambient noise over a radio and a map to figure out where Guy-nam is without participating directly in the operation. There's dreadful irony to another moment, when Guy-nam must rejoin the ranks of his old squad to become just another anonymous face among the rows of soldiers. That moment, by the way, gets at the dehumanization of an autocratic system with more potency than a subplot involving Hyun-san's former dreams of playing piano and needing to hide his sexuality.

Put together in constant succession, though, the plotting of Escape is simply too much to be believed—relying on luck and perfect timing and, in the case of Hyuan-san particularly and especially during the climax, characters acting against the little we know of them for the protagonist's benefit. Lee's skillful orchestration of the action almost tricks us into ignoring such things—but not quite.

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