Special Delivery (2022) Review

“Special Delivery” Theatrical Poster

Director: Park Dae-Min
Cast: Park So-Dam, Song Sae-Byeok, Kim Eui-Sung, Jeong Hyun-Jun, Yum Hye-Ran, Han Hyun-Min, Heo Dong-Won, Yeon Woo-Jin, Baek Do-Gyum
Running Time: 108 min.

By Paul Bramhall 

Following in the footsteps of Jason Statham in The Transporter series, in Special Delivery Park So-dam continues the fine cinematic tradition of playing a character who transports “anything that regular post carriers can’t.” Like its predecessors, Special Delivery frames itself as a gritty action flick, this time from Korea with the action playing out on the streets of Busan.

The third outing for director and script writer Park Dae-min following 2009’s Private Eye and 2016’s Seondal: The Man Who Sells the River, Special Delivery marks the first time for Dae-min to use the present day as the setting for the narrative. Opening to a pulsating 80’s influenced synthesiser soundtrack, we’re quickly introduced to So-dam’s particular line of work as she picks up a gangster who needs to be delivered to the port. Frazzled at the fact that the driver is a woman, whatever concerns he has are soon thrust to the back of his mind when it turns out the police have been lying in wait, and proceed to give chase through the alley ways and express ways of Busan city.

The elephant in the room with Special Delivery is that it’s a movie selling itself on the promise of some vehicular action, however anyone acquainted with Korean action cinema will know that car chases are not its particular forte. Here though the action is executed with an assured hand, relying not so much on the spectacle of speed and destruction, but rather the smarts of the driver to outwit those in pursuit. Utilising the narrow back streets, So-dam evades the cops using everything from her superior parking technique, to silently coasting down a road in reverse so as not to be heard by them in one of the adjacent streets. Perhaps unavoidably, some of the more wow moments can’t escape the noticeable CGI assistance, but there’s nothing on display too unforgivable.

Working for a junkyard that doubles as an underground transportation agency, it’s a pleasure to see Park So-dam taking on a lead role in such a mainstream production. After strong turns in the likes of 2015’s The Silenced and The Priests, in recent years she’s been particularly selective with her roles, with memorable performances in the likes of Zhang Lu’s Fukuoka, and of course Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Here she’s given a chance to (both figuratively and literally) let her hair down in a slice of pure popcorn entertainment.

The plot emerges when a former baseball player (Yeon Woo-jin – Revivre, Tunnel 3D) who’s been on the take from a pair of corrupt cops decides to attempt a runner with their stash. Armed with the only electronic tag that grants access to the bank account where the dirty money is being stored, the broker helping him to get away with his young son connects him with the agency So-dam works with. The pickup goes awry though when the corrupt cops and their hired entourage get to him before he can make a clean break, leading to death by multiple baseball bats, and leaving his son to make it to the waiting car alone with a bag stuffed full of cash and the tag that the cops are after.

The story then follows a familiar trajectory – So-dam helps the son to get away from the murderous thugs who are chasing after him, and after initially dumping him in the city and telling him to find his own way, realises she has a conscience and takes him under her wing. Korea normally does a solid job with child roles, from Kim Sae-ron in 2010’s The Man from Nowhere, to Kim Si-ah in 2018’s Miss Baek, both movies that also rely on the audience being invested in the child being saved. Special Delivery somewhat falters in this regard, in that the actor playing the child, Jeong Hyeon-jun (reuniting with So-dam from Parasite), is given a character who’s rarely anything other than irritating. From incessant crying, to a character ‘quirk’ that has him burp in response to questions he doesn’t like, he’s just not that easy to care about.

There are also character issues with the pair of cops, played by Song Sae-byeok (Seven Years of Night, A Girl at My Door) and Heo Dong-won (Spiritwalker, Bring Me Home), in that their blatant villainy makes it a stretch to believe they’ve managed to remain off the radar to their superiors. Sae-byeok in particular acts more like a gangster than some of the actual characters who are gangsters, and most of his lines come from the Korean gangster playbook that anyone who’s seen more than a handful of Korean gangster flicks will instantly recognize. In some ways their characters are indicative of a wider conflict that seems to be taking place within Special Delivery, in that on the surface it wants to be a glossy mainstream action movie, however underneath it can’t seem to resist defaulting to the typical grit and violence often found in Korean gangster movies.

The clash results in a final product that often feels like it has an identity crisis, and leaves more sinister elements that are hinted at simply hanging in the wind. The owner of the scrapyard played by Kim Eui-sung (Rampant, Steel Rain) acts as a kind of adoptive father figure to So-dam, and when initially trying to offload the kid she contacts him knowing he has connections who deal with “kids”. It’s clear that the people who come to pick up Hyeon-jun are organ traffickers, which leads to So-dam going back to rescue him shortly after, but the fact that the person she respects so much is in league with child traffickers never gets touched upon (or changes the way the audience is expected to view his character), which seems like a strange omission.

Similarly the tale of how So-dam knows Eui-sung, involving the fact that she’s a North Korean defector and he was the one that picked her up at the Russian border “covered in blood”, feels strangely out of tune with the breezy tone Dae-min seems to be going for. In a way it harkens back to the tonally jarring action comedies of the early 2000’s, such as My Wife Is a Gangster, that frequently placed scenes of slapstick comedy next to ones of gratuitous violence, and 20 years later the combination of the 2 still doesn’t really sit well. On the plus side, Special Delivery at least shows a more progressive approach to its casting by marking the big screen debut of Han Hyun-min, a Nigerian Korean model who plays one of the workers (who seem to consist entirely of South Asian immigrants) at the scrapyard who’s close to So-dam.

Despite these bumps in the road (sorry), So-dam makes for a charismatic anchor whether she’s rocking threads straight out of the 80’s or throwing down against a group of hired thugs, and no doubt her presence makes Special Delivery a more entertaining experience than it probably deserves to be. The pull of the Korean gangster movie overtaking the mainstream action flick feels like it comes full circle by the end, which discards the whole vehicle angle all together, and goes for the traditional approach of the lone hero going up against multiple attackers in a bloody showdown to the death. The use of a staple gun makes for an obvious nod to The Man from Nowhere, and while nobody will leave the scene feeling like So-dam is the next Korean action actress, she sells herself well enough to give the sequence its intended impact.

In the end Special Delivery delivers a perfectly competent action flick that doesn’t strive to be anything more, and ultimately is unlikely to linger in the memory more than a few hours after watching it. Despite kicking off by hinting at an 80’s tinted action adventure, Dae-min feels like a director overwhelmed by the expectation of what a Korean movie involving gangsters should be, and any of the initial promise for something different soon turns into typical generic fare. Had anyone else except the charismatic Park So-dam been in the lead, Special Delivery would hardly be worth a mention, but as it is, she does just enough to save it from the scrapheap. 

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10