Review: ‘Train to Busan’ sequel ‘Peninsula’ ups the action, but nearly goes off the rails

As the first major film to be released worldwide amidst the coronavirus outbreak, the South Korean action-horror blockbuster Peninsula may not offer audiences the sense of escape they’re looking for. Set in the same world as 2016’s smash success Train to Busan, Peninsula focuses on a highly-contagious zombie outbreak that has sealed the Korean peninsula off from the rest of the world, a notion that hits close to home as major border crossings around the world remain closed due to the pandemic.

Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho returns for Peninsula, which expands the contained terror of the first film into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that feels like a Korean take on Mad Max. After the events of the first film, Marine Captain Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) and his family are on a ship leaving South Korea when a zombie attack infects some of the crew, including his sister and his nephew. Forced to leave his family behind after they are bitten in the attack, Jung-seok and his devastated brother-in-law Chul-min are brought back together while living in Hong Kong with an offer to retrieve $20 million in cash that’s been hidden in a food truck back in quarantined South Korea.

With a heavy nod to Escape From New York, Jung-seok leads a crew to sneak back into gang-controlled Korea to secure the cash, while trying to avoid the hordes of zombies that patrol the deserted streets.

More of a straight-ahead action film than its predecessor, Peninsula offers plenty of nail-biting action scenes between Jung-seok’s crew, the militia that captures them, and the endless mass of zombies that at one point literally fall from the sky. While Yeon Sang-ho has opened up the world this time around, the magic of Train to Busan was just how contained the action was — the very fact that the protagonists were fighting off a zombie attack while confined to a moving train was what made that film so unique and exciting. With Peninsula, we get plenty of CGI-heavy shots of the deserted Korean city, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Even the car chases suffer from CGI overload — you get the sense that the entire film was shot in a huge abandoned factory and everything else was added in post, leaving the film often feeling like a series of stitched-together video game cutscenes.

While many of the characters are boiler-plate militia members that are fairly indistinguishable, the film ratchets the excitement up a notch when Jung-seok meets two young sisters (Lee Ye-won, Lee Re) who come to his rescue and plan an escape with their family. The sheer insanity of a young girl behind the wheel outracing zombies like a horror-themed installment of the Fast and the Furious franchise is just the sort of manic energy that sets Peninsula apart from the countless zombie apocalypse titles filling up your streaming platform of choice.

Peninsula may not be as innovative as Train to Busan, but it’s a solid action-horror hybrid that should hit the spot for everyone missing what would have been this summer’s blockbuster season. But if you do decide to see Peninsula in the theatre, please wear a mask, so we can avoid this country also being sealed off from the rest of the world.

Peninsula is in theatres now.