Tunnel is about car dealer Lee Jung-soo (Ha Jung-woo), who is headed home to Hado City with a cake for his preschooler daughter. His drive home takes him through the Hado Tunnel, which unfortunately for him collapses while he's in it. With little more than the cake, one and a half bottles of water, his cell phone and whatever other junk is in his car, Jung-soo has to survive long enough to await rescue. Outside, his wife Se-hyun (Donna Bae) and take force leader Dae-kyung (Oh Dal-su) have to deal with incompetence, callousness and bureaucracy as they try to mount Jung-soo's rescue.
The movie keeps the center of this story pretty simple, but it embellishes around the edges. There is surprisingly sharp satire dancing around the fringes of the film, its depiction of modern Korean society at large pretty biting when all is said and done. But the core of this film is just an average guy stuck in an extraordinary situation, and the equally regular people that offer him slivers of hope in an increasingly impossible predicament.
The film clearly built on some very specific angst about modern South Korea and its government. Just underneath this story of one man’s struggle to survive is the idea of a South Korea that seems to be falling apart. Construction companies are cutting corners, leading to disasters like the one in the film. Government is incompetent and can be shocking callous about the fate of its citizens. And the media only seems to be getting in the way. This anger is channeled into the film’s sense of humor, finding room in even the dourest moments for a bit of social commentary. There is a particularly clever bit early in the film that plays with the struggle of young Koreans to hold on to corporate jobs, the film approaching the sublime as it forgoes the desperation of survival for a moment and touches on the very mundane angst of its characters.
But even if you put all that aside, the film still just works as a straightforward survival picture. It runs a little long, the story not really meaty enough on its own to sustain it over-two-hour runtime. But it’s a fairly breezy ride. The film gets to the disaster really quickly, all while cleverly establishing a bunch of elements that will pay off later on. And likable characters go a long way in making this story work. This is basically about a bunch of people who remain decent in the face of the horrific. While politicians and businessmen and reporters are all trying to find their angle, Jung-soo, Se-hyun, and Dae-Kyung are just trying to do the best they can, never forgetting what it means to be human. They are confronted by several genuinely harrowing moral dilemmas, and they just keep on trying to be good.
And that’s more than enough. The film keeps its good nature and its sense of humor, and it makes the two hours go by pretty quickly. It also helps that the production values are so good. The film makes cramped spaces inside the tunnel feel like their own alien world. Outside, the film captures the scale of the rescue mission. Ha Jung-woo and Oh Dal-su are terrific in the two biggest roles. Ha is just so likable as Jung-soo, and Oh’s earthiness is a good fit for the character. Doona Bae doesn’t get nearly enough to do, but she never falters when the film really calls on her to provide new emotional dimensions.
Tunnel channels very specific South Korean angst into long-ish but undeniably effective mainstream entertainment. It is a genre exercise that just keeps revealing new facets, becoming more and more satisfying as things go on. This is a funny yet affecting film that manages to sneak in some potent commentary, bemoaning a society with a shortage of compassion, forgetting the value of human life in the face of its capitalistic development. It gets to that, and it still manages to be really fun.
My Rating:
