How entertaining?     ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆

9 November 2012

This article is a review of DERANGED.

By Hemanth Kissoon

“That’s incredibly attractive,” Jae-hyeok

Hot on the heels of Steven Soderbergh’s pinnacle virus disaster thriller CONTAGION, DERANGED eschews brains and logic, and opts rather for a ridiculously fast-paced roller-coaster ride. To its credit, there’s no coincidence that such an attraction at a theme park opens events. My immediate reaction on pulling into the credits was one of excitement, but as you examine the movie, the ideas and story fall apart in your hands and flutter away in the wind. Unfortunate, as by the halfway point I had high hopes this might be the equivalent of THE HOST.

The focus is a slightly extended family. An abrasive beginning promises interesting dynamics, which could hopefully evolve into a bleak treatise on kinship, class and corporate responsibility. That’s not the route the filmmakers go down. Jae-hyeok is a talented scientist who somehow threw away his career via a disastrous share investment. The tip and encouragement came from his brother. Jae-hyeok is now a drugs seller, forced into humiliatingly brown-nosing the medical establishment, so that they will purchase his company’s products. This pharmaceutical corporation’s shares are, not-very-subtly-to-the-future-story, suddenly bought up. At this point it doesn’t matter that a major plot point is being slapped in our faces; there’s hope that DERANGED might be a genre mash-up: contagion pic, and corporate espionage action thriller. That desire doesn’t pan out. And neither does the interesting lead, whose anger at himself is dished out on his family with irritability and snappishness.

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The virus kicks off spectacularly. So far so lean, so enjoyable. When we discover what it is, a gruesome reminder of the culprits in DREAMCATCHER surfaces. Have we got a horror movie now? Ooooh, I coo to myself.

Then all the hard work and boldness dissipates. We, without quite noticing, get quarantined quietly in the sentimental and ludicrous zone. Of course Jae-hyeok’s wife and two young kids get infected. And the main plot becomes about him zooming about the place (entertainingly) to get hold of the antidote. Conveniently his family survive longer than everyone else it seems, and their salvation is dragged out. The narrative mechanics remind me of television shows 24 and THE KILLING – both suffer from an annoying habit of continually snatching away at the at the last moment the thing the protagonists require so desperately. That shizzle gets repetitive. It’s fun for the first three times. After that, diminishing returns kick in. But still: so Jae-hyeok, so engrossing, mostly. However, the stuff with his kin and the authorities scour away at credibility to non-existence. Did writer-director Jeong-woo Park do any kind of research into what actually might happen?

Then we get mega happenstance. The lead’s bro is a cop who stumbled across the first case. And get this: his girlfriend is one of the doctors trying to find the cure. Lest we forget, Jae-hyeok’s employer is somehow involved, and he’s a scientist. To nail the coffin of ridiculousness firmly closed, the ending reeks of mawkishness and back-tracking. The concessions, initially denied, offered up to corporatism is sick-inducing. At least that’s not one of the virus’s traits.

DERANGED has brutal and exhilarating symptoms, but doesn't transmogrify, disappointingly.

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