Karl Marx himself may have written that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Still, not even the most dedicated members of Japan’s Red Army Faction — a militant, “Communist Manifesto”-carrying group most famous for hijacking a JAL flight in the spring of 1970 — could have imagined their signature action would eventually be restaged as a slick and sprawling Netflix comedy combining the smirking political satire of “Burn After Reading” with the cold-blooded visual dynamism of a Park Chan-wook film.
Sure, the Yodogo Hijacking Incident wasn’t quite a tragedy, and “Good News” is just a bit too grounded to feel like a true farce, but the disconnect between the severity of what happened and the blitheness with which Korean director Byun Sung-hyun (“The Merciless”) has re-imagined it is striking enough to affirm Marx’s point. I have to imagine that the hijackers would’ve been happy about that; bumbling and inept as they appear in Byun’s movie, their conviction smacks of courage when compared to the spinelessness of the bureaucrats tasked with solving the crisis, all of whom care more about their own egos and careers than they do the 130 passengers whose lives are at stake.
Just droll, twisty, and stylish enough to forgive this 136-minute film for using a lot more runway than it needs to be airborne, “Good News” is a veritable caricature of middle-management — an epic parody of passing the buck. That so few of the actual facts have been changed, despite an impishly self-conflicting disclaimer that insists it was “inspired by real events” but also that “all of the characters and events portrayed are fictional,” only serves to strengthen Byun’s damning portrayal of political cowardice.
For all of the lip service that Byun and Lee Jin-seong’s knotted script pays to the relative nature of truth, however, “Good News” initially makes it easy to separate fact from fiction. Did heavily armed hijackers commandeer a Boeing 727 as part of their plan to further a worldwide revolution against the United States and its allies? Indeed, and an opening flurry of newsreel footage helps to confirm that we aren’t completely outside of history. Did the Communists obsessively quote the boxing manga “Ashita no Joe” as a source of inspiration? Was their leader as handsome as “Tokyo Vice” star Show Kasamatsu, or their youngest member barely old enough to fly without parental supervision? Probably not.
Did the crisis highlight the Kafkaesque absurdity of Cold War politics by sparking an international circle-jerk between various representatives from South Korea, North Korea, Japan, America, and the Soviet Union? You bet. Did the South Koreans rely on the help of a rumpled and mysterious fixer called “Nobody” (a Lupin the III-esque Sul Kyung-gu, his character wise enough to treat the whole situation like a cosmic joke) to goad everyone into action? I highly doubt it, but history tends to forget the people who refuse to accept credit for it. Ditto those who manage to avoid taking the blame.
“Good News” has plenty of fun exaggerating the personas of the different parties involved in the situation, from the violent JAL chairman who only cares about his brand, to the veteran airplane pilot who can’t stop complaining about his hemorrhoids, and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency Director (Ryoo Seung-bum) who tries to wash his hands of this entire shitshow like a used car salesman desperate to move an old lemon off the lot. But the movie only really takes flight after the line between “tragedy” and “farce” begins to blur, like when a proactive air force “double parks” a jet in front of the 727 as it stops to refuel. (The visual of the two planes facing each other on the tarmac as the pilot scampers away from his vehicle is a real laugh-out-loud moment in a movie that tends to fall back on knowing smiles.)
Funny as it is, that sequence pales in comparison to what happens later, when a young Korean Air Force lieutenant named Seo (Hong Kyung) has the bright idea of executing a double hijack. The Red Army Faction believes they’re flying into Pyongyang, but Seo — in a standoff that’s shot like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, complete with ultra-wide framing, skintight leather chaps, and a few errant tumbleweeds for good measure — wrests control of the radio frequency from his North Korean counterparts and fools the hijackers into landing in Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport instead.
Remarkably, this part of the story is rooted in truth. Gimpo really was hastily outfitted to resemble Pyongyang in the hopes that the hijackers would believe they’d succeeded. Byun simply “yes ands” the record by imagining that an overweight local movie director was recruited to complete the illusion with a fleet of costumed extras waiting for the Red Army Faction on the “North Korean” runway. Like everyone else in this movie, however, the director wants to frame this story on his own terms (“If I can’t capture this historical moment on film, I at least want to participate in it!”), and his eagerness to control the action risks creating new conflict.
Not only does this display of egomaniacal buffoonery make for “Good News”’ most effective setpiece, the sheer absurdity of the situation embellished by Byun’s arch framing and previously unknown flair for dry comedy, it also epitomizes the core ethos of a film in which shaping the narrative is always more important than saving the hostages. Even the relatively noble and clear-headed Seo is motivated by the legacy of his father’s sacrifice, which complicates his feelings about the value of heroism even as it pushes him to make the most of his moment in the limelight.
“Good News” has no compunctions about depicting its characters — even and especially the South Korean ones — as narcissistic dolts. But these larger-than-life figures are as broad as their context is hyper-specific. That functional mismatch saps away at the comedy of a film clearly made to be enjoyed by a global audience. (Netflix is releasing it around the world at the same time, and the multi-language audio track will unhelpfully default to English for anyone who tries to stream the movie from America.) Pointed gestures toward the lingering tension between Japan and Korea — and between those two countries and the rest of the planet — are drowned out by tiresome bickering and exaggerated gags, like a meaningful conversation swallowed into the sound of an airplane engine screaming overhead.
Byun’s visual playfulness is likewise compelling enough to compensate for the shortcuts in his storytelling — active camerawork and inventive CGI combine with Jo Hyoung-rae’s heightened cinematography to imbue the film’s airplane cabins and flight control towers with a vivid sense of theatricality. Yet the director is so eager to make a spectacle out of this scenario that “Good News” begins to feel as self-insistent as its characters.
Perhaps that’s by design, and Byun is bending his own form towards a damning commentary on universal self-interest — even in the face of a crisis. But the movie’s soft-hearted underbelly fails to support that reading, and by the time the story finally arrives at its final moments, the unsparing cynicism that supplied its initial lift has been dragged back down to Earth by the weight of bland truisms. In a rich but increasingly disappointing film where everyone is trying so hard to pass the buck, it’s only fitting that viewers end up holding the bag.
Grade: C+
“Good News” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, October 17.
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