Summary
A slick South Korean action film confirms the star power of Park So-Dam — as if there was any doubt in our minds.
Filmmaker Park Dae-min may not be a household name for international audiences yet, but SPECIAL DELIVERY (특송) could change that. Park’s third feature, following Seondal: The Man Who Sells the River (2016) and Private Eye (2009), is a superior South Korean action thriller that kicks off with some gnarly car chases that could ram Baby Driver off the road.
The sequence introduces us to Eun-Ha (Park So-Dam), a driver working for the shady Baek (Kim Eui-Sung). Her particular set of skills are in delivering anything to anyone at any given time, backed by a cool attitude behind the wheel.
When a former baseball player gets in too deep with gangsters, he plans to use the service to get the hell out of dodge. Yet when the bad guys catch up with him before Eun-Ha arrives, she winds up with his son Seo-won (Jung Hyeon-jun) in the backseat of her car. With both the crooks and the corrupt cops after them, it’s an adrenalin-fuelled race towards an indeterminate finish line.
SPECIAL DELIVERY wears its influences clearly on its sleeves: Edgar Wright’s aforementioned Baby Driver is on one arm and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive runs down the other. Still, the mostly familiar plotting manages to work thanks to the presence of Park So-dam, reteaming with young Parasite co-star Jung Hyeon-jun for an effective if unlikely buddy actioner. Park, who more recently appeared in the effectively low-key Fukuoka, gets to flex her action chops. She makes a convincing argument that she should be fronting more action films both in South Korea and around the globe.
Park Dae-Min’s script occasionally gets a little tangled in some side-plotting, not least of which is the late introduction of a crooked cop and some revelations about Eun-Ha’s past. It’s not a major issue, it’s just that SPECIAL DELIVERY works best when the road between A and B is more or less a straight line.
All that aside, Park Dae-min maintains the initial momentum for most of the film’s tidy running time, culminating in a terrific vehicular face-off in a parking garage. It’s a throwback to the kind of South Korea action film we would have devoured on DVD in the early 2000s before smugly recommending it to friends who thought they’d seen everything. So, jump in the passenger seat as soon as you can, as this is definitely a contender for one of the top South Korean thrills of 2022.
2022 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Park Dae-Min | WRITERS: Park Dae-Min | CAST: Park So-dam, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Eui-sung, Jung Hyeon-jun | DISTRIBUTOR: Next Entertainment World, Fantasia Film Festival | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 14 July – 3 August 2022 (Fantasia)
