Review | Secret Zoo film review: Korean comedy’s low-brow laughs will amuse teenagers but nobody else
- This one-note effort revolves around a zoo with no animals where staff have to dress up as a lion, gorilla, sloth, and polar bear to keep money coming in
- The result is a series of childish gags from characters goofing around in animal costumes
2/5 stars
The plight of caged animals, and the ethical value of zoos in general, is sidestepped completely in director Son Jae-gon’s frustratingly unfunny comedy Secret Zoo, which wrings its procession of tired gags almost exclusively from characters goofing around in animal costumes.
This sluggish, one-note effort, based on the web-comic series created by Hun, kicks off with a shovelful of stodgy exposition, as the fate of Dongsan Park is laid out in heaps of convoluted legalese. Suffice to say, the zoo – or rather the land upon which it is situated – is at the centre of a hotly contested bidding war.
Junior lawyer Tae-soo (Ahn Jae-hong), who is hoping to secure his position at the big city firm handling the property, is inserted as interim zoo director, and has just three months to turn its fortunes around.
Tae-soo’s biggest obstacle is the lack of animals, after the zoo’s previous residents were sold by debt collectors. Unable simply to buy new ones, Tae-soo opts for the next best thing: purchasing realistic lion, gorilla, sloth, and polar bear costumes, and persuading his skeleton staff of handlers to dress up and climb into the enclosures themselves.
