I saw it was the creator of A Hard Day (2014) who made this movie too, and the plot about being stuck in a tunnel is cool too. So of course I had to watch it. I didn't even need to check out the trailer. A Hard Day is not amazing, but it's still one of the best South Korean movies ever made as it's quite fun and super unique.

I kinda wanted good filmmaking here. Just a simple rescue story with good acting. Unfortunately that's not quite what we get. South Korean movies are often 2+ hours long so we get a ton of filler here that feels pointless. And the rescue and survival stories are often just simple and predictable stuff without any cleverness or realism to it. This is not how rescue operations work at all. This is a Hollywood style, overly dramatic melodrame rescue with people screaming, whining, crying, throwing things, screaming some more. There are a few scenes where they plan stuff, but they are only used to add later melodrama not to show us actual rescue work.

If you love melodrama this is for you. If you want a believable survival story this is not it.

I can show a few examples. The tunnel that collapses is a month old so every engineer and architect who built it should still be around. Well, we don't see a single one. Instead a clueless silly guy is leading the rescue operation. He's a typical South Korean comedy clown character, you know what I'm talking about. It's made clear at the start that they DON'T have a proper plan for this stuff so they just make it up as they go along and this screaming clown-like figure is responsible for everything: planning, telling people what to do, telling people when to work. He doesn't know anything about it yet he's the leader. The movie requires someone ignorant to lead the operation because the script is not detailed or deep enough to show any expertise on screen. It's all personal emotional drama like when the leader drinks pee to know what it feels like and it's made into a huge gag where everyone suddenly hears about it. Well, the leader initially finds an old paper map. The guy stuck in the tunnel tells him that a huge fan with number 3 on it collapsed on his car. The leader then counts the fans. There are 6 on the drawing, he counts from the start up to 3 and they drill a hole over that fan location. It takes them 17 days to drill down. Then suddenly someone shows him a Youtube video. The tunnel actually had 7 fans not just 6! So they drilled 150 meter away from the proper site. Is this realistic? Hell no. Something like this could happen, but not because of such a huge silly oversight. Keep in mind all of South Korea is following the rescue. So you likely have thousands of experts calculating everything and making 3D models of the operation. Yet not a single person corrects them. I think this is just stupid.

Then they tell him they drilled in a wrong spot and the guy says he just wants to die instead of waiting any longer even though he has water and seems healthy and energetic. Well, his phone battery dies at that moment. After a few more days the wife signs a contract so that they can start explosion work on a tunnel nearby collapsing the site he is at. The tunnel nearby is apparently super nice to have so they don't want to pause the construction for even one more day. So they stop the rescue mission. The wife tells all of this on a public radio as if he is alive he can hear it. So she is speaking TO HIM while saying: "many think you are already dead so I signed the construction letter". It makes no sense. But she did all of this because a construction worker died on the rescue site. They were sawing some metal pipes and a saw broke and a piece flew into his heart. His mom then visits the wife and throws eggs at her at the rescue site telling everything the wife killed her son. This is what makes the wife stop the operation. But the death is just a regular construction death. He's a construction worker doing this as his job. He was in a safe environment just sawing pipes and would have been doing just this work in any other place. So how is the rescue mission to blame for his death? And how is the wife to blame? I don't quite understand it, but the director needed the wife to stop the effort and this was what he wrote in the script. All lazy and weird. He didn't even care looking into how this stuff is actually done.

At the end the guy is nearly dead as they get to him. But they can't fly him to the hospital because the minister wants to join him in the hospital helicopter so they are standing around waiting for her to arrive. Imagine if this happened in real life with news cameras pointing at the helicopter. She would have been forced to quit the very same day. There are a lot of scenes like this in the movie. Overly dramatic fake scenes with screaming and South Korean slapstick. IMDb doesn't call it a comedy, but it's made exactly as one just without the jokes. It's also impossible to understand how his area looks like. The guy constantly finds new openings and even finds another person. He even finds a HUGE area just outside his car. Why didn't he spot it before?

Is it worth watching? It's up to you. It's not directly bad. It's just all nonsensical South Korean melodrama. You may love such stuff. I wish they used a real disaster instead and made it less silly and more realistic. This is not about his survival or the rescue. And the script is extremely lazy.

TUNNEL is an exemplary addition to the South Korean disaster movie genre and the best I've seen of that genre thus far. The reason it's so good is that the story is small-scale and centred on a single character, so that you really get drawn into his situation and feel for him. In the hands of the excellent actor Ha Jung-woo he's a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist which is a rare thing these days. Jung-woo has played a killer in THE CHASER, a desperate assassin in THE YELLOW SEA, a spy in THE BERLIN FILE and now an ordinary guy in this, and he's been remarkably different in each instance, unrecognisable in fact, which is the mark of a truly great actor. TUNNEL focuses on single-location thrills but keeps the story moving with scenes on the outside which are actually interesting for a change, alongside twists and turns throughout you'll never see coming. The CGI is kept to a minimum and realism is high, making this all the more tense. As with most Korean thrillers, there's heavy satire present used to depict the incompetence of Korean officials, leading to some very funny moments. Doona Bae adds heart to boot. It's a great little film when put together.

Lee Jung-soo is driving home with his daughter's birthday cake. He's driving through a tunnel when it collapses on top of him. His wife Se-hyun is desperate in the outside world. Dae-kyoung leads the effort to rescue him. Jung-soo finds fellow survivor Mina and her little dog.

I was expecting Daylight for some reason and it bothered me that he didn't seem to be trying to dig himself out for a long time. Then he finds Mina and her little dog. It's when he's struggling with the water that I fully committed to the movie. This is not a hero. It helps to have the great Bae Doo-na as the desperate wife. She does the heavy emotional lifting. I could do without the happy ending and a sadder rescue with only the dog would be more compelling. He marks the days on the wall which could show that he almost made it out. That would be the sad ending that this movie deserves.