Mark Reviews Movies: EMERGENCY DECLARATION

Emergency Declaration Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

There's real terror in the premise of Emergency Declaration, which involves someone attacking the passengers of a plane while it's in mid-flight. The terrorist's method is unique in a way that makes the attack feel almost completely hopeless and that's otherwise discomforting. The whole thing is plausible enough that the movie occasionally feels as if it might give the wrong person a horrifying idea.

The movie, from South Korea, was written by director Han Jae-rim, who displays a considerable sense of building suspense as the pieces of the plot come together. We know someone has made an anonymous threat against an airplane, but it's impossible to tell which flight might be the target.

The police look into it, and as their investigation gets closer to identifying the man and his method, we watch the busy goings-on at an airport, where a man is behaving oddly to say the least—asking about how many people will be on a given flight, stalking a little girl who witnessed him putting something into his flesh, smiling his way through invasive questions and vaguely threatening statements.

That strange man is named Jin-seok, and he's played by Yim Si-wan in a genuinely chilling performance. Indeed, the whole movie is filled with some solid performances from the likes of Song Kang-ho as a haggard police detective with a personal motivation for finding the terrorist, Lee Byung-hun as a passenger with a mysterious past, and Kim Nam-gil as the flight's co-pilot, who has to step up to a lot of responsibility as the attack commences.

There are many, many more characters here, as if Han took his inspiration as much from Hollywood disaster movies of the 1970s as from the deviously ingenious idea of the terrorist's method. The cast has probably a couple dozen featured actors playing characters we come to recognize, not only from their screen time, but also from the established archetypes that have come in similar fare before this one.

There's the suspicious guy, who imagines everyone and everything is an obvious or secret threat. There's government official who knows best but is hampered all sorts of internal and external forces. There's a woman worrying about her family at home, and at least she has a direct connection Song's In-ho. She's his wife, who has decided to take a vacation to Hawaii, since her workaholic husband probably won't notice or miss her.

The point of mentioning these broadly defined characters is that Han clearly has bigger intentions in mind than the admirably simple but terror-filled premise of the attacker's plan. That plan is revealed in a clever scene that has the cops watching video tape of experiments with laboratory mice, and as the implications of the bloody mess on those tapes become clearer, we watch Jin-seok head into lavatory on the plane, dig into the wound he cut into his armpit, and retrieve his weapon. It's a virus that highly contagious and quickly fatal, and as more and more passengers start coughing and scratching at blisters, the story moves forward with a claustrophobic sense of imminent and inevitable doom.

Well, it does so up until a point, that is, because there is the matter of all the characters Han has established, all the personal melodrama he develops, and all the interpersonal conflicts he works into the material. Lee's mysterious passenger Jae-hyuk, for example, knows Kim's co-pilot Hyun-soo, who had hoped to never see the man again. Jae-hyuk has a tormented back story, which has resulted in a fear of flying. Once it becomes clear that the virus—which at first kills those infected with it in a short amount of time—seems to be aware that the movie has a lot of subplots and conflicts that it can't interrupt, the tension and sense of impending calamity dissipate just as quickly.

To be fair, Han has written himself into a bit of a corner with this premise, since, in theory, the story would end in horrific disaster quite quickly if he actually followed the rules he has so clearly established. That means the filmmaker has to cheat quite a bit just to keep things going. If he only cheated about the virus' infection time and mortality rate, we might be able to forgive that as a necessary move to maintain the suspense, while still keeping the threat of the premise.

Instead, though, Han goes in a slightly different direction, focusing as much on the government response, the police investigation into the terrorist and his background, and the interpersonal melodrama aboard the plane as he does the passengers' trying to stay alive and dying from the airborne disease. The plot becomes a race against the clock (a clock, again, that feels contrived in the first, based on what we see and have been told), and tight stakes within the plane become increasingly unbelievable ones outside of it, with close calls with fighter jets and protests on the ground and two sequences that involve an emergency landing.

Basically, Emergency Declaration begins with an original and terrifying idea, executed with considerable tension. It's apparently not enough for the filmmaker, unfortunately, who overwhelms the core premise with cliché after over-the-top and frustrating cliché.

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