Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2025
It’s 1970. A plane leaves Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Its destination is Itazuke. But several passengers are about to change its course. Members of the Red Army Faction, armed with guns, knives, and a homemade bomb, hijack the flight and demand to be taken to Pyongyang. They want to join forces with North Korea and use their fellow passengers as collateral to prevent their arrest. It’s a messy and dangerous plan, one that is hard to stop. In Seoul, a strange off-the-grid figure who calls himself Nobody is brought in to mount a rescue mission. All he needs is someone who can read radar and wants to be a hero.
Director Byun Sung-hyun takes inspiration from true events for a very fun and very silly dramedy that finds frivolity amid a story of inept terrorists and political squabbling. While this is a serious subject, Byun is aiming for something more daffy, with hints of Dr. Strangelove and the goofier Bong Joon-ho movies in there. The commie hijackers are zealous in their beliefs but inept in their execution, forever fighting over minor issues while overlooking the basics of trying to escape the country in a commercial airplane (rule number one: don’t be surprised when your pilot doesn’t know how to fly spontaneously to the destination of your choosing. And hitting him on the head won’t fix that.)
On the ground in South Korea, the perennially raucous hierarchy of power seems more interested in fame than saving lives. Park Sang-hyeon, the director of Korean intelligence (Ryoo Seung-bum), veers between trying to take credit for every success and fleeing the building once things turn sour.
Nobody (Sul Kyung-gu) is a fixer whose own intentions seem, if not murky then not exactly altruistic. He’s a trickster who just so happens to be good at whatever subterfuge he’s been brought in to do. His harebrained scheme to save the plane involves Lt. Seo Go-myung (Hong Kyung), a radar operator who dreams of a big promotion so that he can do better in life than his injured war veteran father. He’s lured into an obvious fall guy position by the promise of a medal, but he still seems to have more spine than any of his highers-up. The Americans don’t want to break international laws but will let a Korean soldier take the hit. Park is practically drooling at the chance to use Seo as his shield.
Byun saves his best jokes for the scathing portrayal of bureaucratic cowardice and self-serving intentions. Dozens of lives are on the line and the yes men in suits would rather eat sushi and bitch about their jobs. Even the South Korean President is absent in his moment of need, sending his wife to delegate instead. The terrorists aren’t any better organized. They claim to be fully egalitarian but still relent to the demands of their leader, who seems to be the least inept and most emotionally restrained of a bad bunch. One Red Army Faction member seems to be barely old enough to leave the house on his own. Another is as trigger happy as a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.
There are moments of surrealness, dry one-liners, and trigger-happy frenzy that manage to toe a fine line of tonal consistency. If one joke doesn’t work, you don’t have to wait long for the next one. It’s both tense and hilarious, a hard combination to pull off, even when your plot isn’t focused on a terrorist attack. Think Dr. Strangelove plus Wag the Dog with a bit of Airplane! for good measure. There’s one joke involving a case of bad parking that left the audience in hysterics.
It goes on a bit too long and loses its tightness by the third act, especially following its funniest set-piece wherein the authorities decide to hijack a nearby movie production to dress up a local airport as a North Korean one in the hopes of tricking the terrorists. But Good News is also jam-packed with people on and off-camera who 100% understood the assignment and executed it with over-the-top aplomb. It’s an easy film to enjoy and one that will appeal across the board, regardless of language or your knowledge of 1970s East Asian political crises. Then again, you couldn’t possibly know less about such matters than the characters of this film.
Good News had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be available to watch on Netflix on October 17.
