This is an extremely gory, bloody and bonkers action/horror film about a ship of inmates travelling from the Philippines to Korea. The theme of it is basically overkill – don’t just hit somebody once, do it seven times. Why shoot at someone once when you can use the entire magazine? It’s quite funny and entertaining but it also falls apart whenever you think about it.

Mild SPOILERS

This is one of the bloodiest movies I’ve seen in some time. It’s probably the bloodiest movie I’ve seen in years. There is constant blood. It doesn’t seem to matter which body part gets injured, blood spurts out. As we joked on the subway on the way home, large arteries are in every part of the human body, apparently.

There are some pretty funny deaths and injuries. My favourite part is when one cast member literally jumps over the side of the ship to stab someone else in mid air. I don’t know how he catches up to the other guy, but he does it, and it is very silly.

So there’s a fair amount of creativity in the deaths/injuries (though not all) and in terms of the special effects. (Though, again, it does sort of feel like it’s partially a matter of volume with the blood; certainly it’s not accurate.) And it’s not a slow movie. One other really positive thing: it’s hard (for us anyway) to guess the true protagonist.

But the plot is utterly ridiculous. It’s like Con Air with gore plus a plot twist that turns it into a horror movie. And many things don’t make any sense:

• who is that one cop? is he even a cop? why is he on the ship?
• how did these other people get on the ship? how did the weapons get on the ship? did nobody secure the ship? did nobody sweep the ship? how are the Korean police this incompetent?
• if the protagonist did really set this all up to get revenge, how the hell did he do that?

Much of the backstory is explained with really clunky devices. At one point someone reads a major plot point off of a destroyed laptop. (Seriously.) And then, in the second half of the film, there are all these flashbacks which I found fairly annoying.

Oh and here’s one minor nitpick: After the internet has been disconnected, two guys are just typing away on their computers still, for no reason, instead of paying attention to their cargo. A number of other nitpicks involve some major spoilers.

5/10 because I was thoroughly entertained for much of it.