Decision to Leave (2022) may have set the South Korean film renaissance back 20 years. When I found out the director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden had come out with a new movie, I was completely willing to entrust him with 2 hours and 18 minutes of my time. Now I’m thinking they gave Park Chan-wook Best Director at Cannes because they all felt bad for him.

The idea that there’s an inherent romance in the cop/suspect relationship is a cool and interesting one, even if the movie that came out of it is a big yawn. And Chan-wook has not gone so far astray that the film doesn’t have some killer moments. “What time together? … When I embraced you and whispered I was happy?” is a gut punch. And Seo Rae’s, “I came to Ipo to be one of your unsolved cases. Put me on your wall and think of me only” is romantic, I guess. But “Killing is like smoking, only the first time is hard” is on the border between a totally sick line and a wanna-be noir cliche.

Regardless, these sparks of competence couldn’t star a forest fire in Oregon. By the time Hae-joon is shouting for Seo Rae while standing directly above the place where she already drowned herself under the sand in high tide, I was not thinking, “How beautifully sad and poetic,” I was thinking, “Dear God, is this fucking movie over yet?”

I can do a slow film. 2019’s Burning, a South Korean masterpiece, operates at an unhurried, expertly controlled crawl until the final moments that make it all worth it. I can do stomach-crushing ambitious endings like the one in Bong Joon Ho’s classic Memories of Murder. But when it comes to Chan-wook’s latest, dull drivel, I should have made the Decision to Leave the theater. 0/10

P.S. What’s with the phones! Too many phones! Enough with the phone stuff!!