Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula review: A braindead and predictable zombie sequel

The film is so predictably laid out, and so blandly CGI-heavy, that it barely registers in this year of real-world horrors

Dir: Yeon Sang-ho. Starring: Gang Dong-won, Lee Jung-hyun, Lee Re, Kwon Hae-hyo, Kim Min-jae, Koo Kyo-hwan. 15, 116 mins

Train to Busan, released in 2016, feels awfully familiar now. No, we’re not all running around in a panic while the living dead snack on our tendons, but Yeon Sang-ho’s commuter train-set zombie film reminds us that every crisis is steered by the divides of class and wealth. It never takes long for the privileged to (quite literally) shut the doors on their fellow man. Those same themes trickled through the film’s animated prologue, Seoul Station, and there was a hope that Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula, this year’s sequel, would follow in its tracks – that we’d be delivered a horror film primed for the pandemic age.

Unfortunately, Peninsula feels somewhat braindead, even with Yeon back as director. It’s a sequel suffering from all the things sequels tend to suffer from: familiar tropes, an explosion in special effects, and thematic weightlessness. Now it’s bigger, shaggier, and far less focused. The unlucky victims that populated the first film may have been caricatures, but they were rooted in the mundane – office workers, high schoolers, and retirees. Here, we get a hero who’s all grit and nerve.

Four years have passed since the South Korean government lost control of the virus, choosing instead to shut its doors to the world and declare itself defeated. Marine Jung-Seok (Gang Dong-won) and his brother-in-law, Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon), are now refugees in Hong Kong, living “like cockroaches” and shunned by the local population. When a few gangsters offer them a job – return to the peninsula and fetch an abandoned truck containing $20m – it feels like they have no choice but to accept.

But here’s where any potential for concrete social commentary ends. When the two men arrive at Incheon, a port city, they discover Korea has turned into a post-apocalyptic fantasy land. Among the vines and rusted cars and gloomy, hand-painted sermons (“God has forsaken us,” one reads) lives a cast of characters all graduated from the Mad Max school of survival. Unit 631, a small group of soldiers under the leadership of Captain Seo (Koo Kyo-hwan), have no hope that their superiors will rescue them. They live now as warlords, picking the city clean of its food supplies and tossing stragglers into a zombie-filled pit for entertainment – their very own Thunderdome.

Unit 631: graduates of the ‘Mad Max’ school of survival (StudioCanal)

On the streets, teen Jooni (Lee Re) buckles into her SUV and mows down zombies like they’re all oversized garden gnomes. She’s whip-smart and highly skilled; so is her sister, Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won), with her arsenal of RC cars all emblazoned with flashing lights, the perfect distraction. And so is their mother Min-jung (Lee Jung-hyun), her body always tense and ready to take a bullet or a zombie bite for her kids.

Peninsula boasts a perfectly serviceable gallery of heroes and villains, but everyone’s so hyper-focused on their own goals that there's no room for all the fears and hesitations – the sudden moments of selflessness and cruelty that made the original Train to Busan more than just a humdrum action-horror. There are still a few ghoulish images, like a shuffling, zombie take on the rat king or a mass of half-decayed features pressed up against glass, briefly caught by a beam of light. But the rest of Peninsula is so predictably laid out, and so blandly CGI-heavy, that it barely registers in this year of real-world horrors.