The title says it all. Then I read its synopsis and right away I knew how much should I expect from it. Because this might be a fresh attempt in the Korean film, at least for the first time I'm seeing in a Korean film, but not from the world cinema. Yeah, I have seen plenty, and I'd liked most of them. But this film was much, much better than it had been rated in the internet. The story, the main event starts without wasting any time. There's no initial developments like intros. When the thriller-adventure parts commences, reveals everything you have to know.

Just over 2 hours long, the story frequently switches back and forth to where a man got trapped in a collapsed tunnel road and the outside where people and rescue team gathered. Like any other similar themed film, it borrowed a handful of clichés, but still you can witness the effort for the avoidance. Like if you see something or someone's crucial part come into play, usually you would predict what might happen to it in the later part of the story. Since those are unavoidable, they simply skipped in the final act as it is understandable and not to waste developing them to some extent.

So a man is fighting for his survival after a disaster strikes. But he got a cell phone signal buried under a deep mountain that I could not get. Anyway, he does make know his state of condition to the outside world. Soon they all rally to get him out. This film is not entirely a serious episode, despite the theme was. A little bit of satire. If that's how the film was intended or not, at least I had a couple of good laughs. Kind of reminded me 'Peepli (Live)', about the media circus in such situation. But that is the truth, what todays media have become, because of competition among themselves.

❝Don't be weak and say you'll die, just live.❞

The trapped man has to make sure about food and water to survive till the rescue team reaches him down which could take a week or more. Yeah, they kind of mention the recent Chile event which was made into the film, 'The 33'. His portion of the story is like the combination of '127 Hours', 'Buried' and of course that Chilean film. There are lots of things happen, you could say twists and turns. Kind of too much at some point, the way they added more contents to it, but decently it all worked out.

Meanwhile, on the outside world, not lags behind. It has its own set of characters and its circumstance events. Lots of fun and also highlights wrongs. Particularly like I said, the media and how politicians make use of such incident for publicity. And the final one about the construction firms and their shoddy works for profits. They have dug on these topics, but did not go deeper, because to keep it lighter and entertaining film than all about awareness.

All the way an engaging narrative. Means a long film, but very swiftly told story. Visually, it was a well made film, like everything's looked natural and believable. You could not differentiate the CGI/green screen work and the real objects of those disaster parts. But not the technical details such as drilling or the hollow space where he stays alive. When the narration progresses, it gets even worse, like you would say how could that even possible or just they wanted it that way to end the tale.

A small part of the end kind of skips, but that's good for the film than dragging it for another half an hour. The casting was good, they all performed well, but my favourite was Oh Dal-su. As usual, I loved his part, one of the finest supporting characters in the world cinema. It's not a great film, but good, and acceptable as what it is. In the end feels like worth it. So I decided to suggest it for those who are interested, but could not decide whether to go for it or not, and for the Korean film fans outside the Korea.

7.5/10

A husband and father is heading home with his daughter's birthday cake when a tunnel collapses trapping him inside his car.

Disaster movies are meant to be filled with tension and drama. This film did not fail in giving its viewers a healthy dose of both. While it is a bit drawn out, it is a decent movie that I found to be enjoyable. It is hard for me to review disaster movies simply because to have the right amount of tension you need a curiosity as to what might happen next. Knowing too much takes away from the anticipation about what might happen next. So, I'm just gonna be short and sweet about it by saying that it is a good film that had me confidently saying that had I been this fella, I would never have to work again because I would have sued the socks off of everybody.

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.