This often frenetic satire tips viewers off to its determinedly sardonic attitude with a variation of the tried and true (and tired) movie disclaimer “Based on true events.” Here we are told that the movie was “inspired” by real events, while insisting that its characters are fictional. This double-talk is apt for a film in which, at one point or another, pretty much all of the characters tell each other lies.
The hijacking, or rather hijackings, depicted in “Good News,” directed by South Korean filmmaker Byun Sung-hyun from a script he co-wrote with Lee Jin-seong, seem to have a point. The movie is set in 1970, back when smuggling a firearm onto a passenger plane was considerably less complicated than it would be today. The victimized flight is on a Japanese airline, scheduled to go from Tokyo to Itazuke. The pilots and the flight attendants are appropriately relaxed, anticipating a routine flight. The hijackers who storm the cockpit are quite a pair. There’s cool-as-a-cucumber Denji (Sho Kasumatsu), whose female counterpart Asuka (Nairu Yamamoto) does more than play “bad cop”—she’s a crazed beast, a whirling dervish of shrieking anger with a potential hair trigger. And they want a direct flight to Pyongyang.
After the pilots relay this to the air traffic controllers, the control tower fills up with experts who try to plot a strategy to foil the hijackers. It’s a bit of a challenge, as the hijackers can hear the cockpit transmissions. (Trying to counter this somehow, the controllers enlist a young Korean radar expert played by baby-faced South Korean television icon Hong Kyung.)
One thing the airline professionals have over the hijackers is, well, expertise. Turns out the hijackers have no viable course by which to get to Pyongyang—their map of the whole of Korea looks as if it were torn out of an atlas. There’s an elaborate ruse to fake out the hijackers by disguising an airport to look as if it’s that of Pyongyang, complete with a welcoming marching band. Everyone involved in the action shows profound levels of incompetence. Enter “Nobody.”
Who is “Nobody?” As the man himself explains, “I’m a nobody, so you can just call me Nobody.” The shabby but charismatic possible fixer is played by Sul Kyung-gu, the South Korean superstar who played the lead in Byun’s 2022 “Kingmaker”—a nattily dressed, charismatic politician. Sul’s Nobody is substantially scruffier but a notably deft strategist and negotiator. He has a lot of noise to cut through as South Korean intelligence officials, craven politicians, various diplomats, and one or two pushy Americans try to inject themselves into the scenario.
The film recalls some classic South Korean satire—I was reminded at times of the still potent 2005 black comedy by Im Sang-soo, “The President’s Last Bang”—and also the 1997 American classic “Wag the Dog.” But the irrepressible tone of mordant giggliness this movie hits so often is entirely its own, keeping the movie buoyant throughout its over two-hour running time.
