Special Delivery review – generic but propulsive Korean getaway thriller

You don’t have to look too hard to see the films that inspired Korean thriller Special Delivery. From its rules-based getaway driver protagonist calling to mind Ryan Gosling in Drive to set-pieces lifted almost wholesale from Baby Driver (via a villain who’s obviously channelling Gary Oldman in Leon), there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. It makes for a generic experience, but writer-director Park Dae-min mostly uses this familiarity as an asset, allowing for a fun, turn-your-brain-off ride that should make for a breezy Friday night’s viewing.

Parasite star Park So-dam plays Eun-ha, a North Korean defector turned getaway driver/criminal courier in Busan. She’s a consummate professional, much respected by her clientele until, of course, a job lands her in a mess far above her paygrade. Hired to drive a baseball match-fixer and his young son Seo-won (fellow Parasite alumnus Jung Heyon-jun) to an escape boat, she instead arrives at the exact same time as the corrupt cops that the fixer ripped off. Soon enough, the fixer is dead and Eun-ha is on the run with Seo-won and a huge bag of cash in tow.

From here, the plot offers few surprises as the sullen Eun-ha gradually warms to Seo-won as the pair seek a way out of their sticky situation. Though it is predictable, director Park keeps Special Delivery moving at a fast enough pace that you don’t really mind, quick-firing scenes of vehicular carnage, bloody shootouts, and internal conflicts amongst the authorities.

Also helping matters is a very fun villain performance from Song Sae-byeok as the corrupt police captain, one that walks the line between dangerously manic and outright cartoonish. The captain is nasty and unpredictable, driven by fear of discovery by the intelligence services as much as he is greed and sadism, making for a compellingly hateful Big Bad. Much like the rest of Special Delivery, it’s hardly an original piece of work, but the way it mixes and matches elements from other (mostly superior) thrillers makes the 110-minute runtime simply fly by.

Special Delivery is now available on various streaming platforms.