2025 | rated PG | Animated | (VO) Arden Cho, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Ahn Hyo-Seop, Ken Jeong, Lee Byung-hun | directed by Chris Happelhans and Maggie Kang | 1 hr 35 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
A trio of world-famous k-pop singers – Rumi, Mira and Zoey (Arden Cho, May Hong and Ji-young Yoo) – lead a double life fighting demons when they aren’t on stage as Huntr/x. But their latest hit single has gotten hell all riled up and has sent demons in the form of a rival Boy Band called the Saja Boys to win over fans and steal their souls.
Netflix’s mega-hit K-Pop Demon Hunters is a slick, animated unlikely genre mash-up of K-Pop musical – in a time when people claim to not like musicals but love this and Wicked – and hack and slash demon fighting action. It’s bright, fast, tuneful and original in a world of franchise films. It will rivet little kids with its anime-styled action sequences set to rap/pop musical numbers that make the movie look like a music video. If they’re under 5, drop the kids in front of it and you it will be a completely inoffensive imagination kick-starter.
There, now that the kids are out of the way, can we carve out a little corner of the internet to talk about this movie? I hate to be the spoil sport here – particularly with how much parents love this movie and how under-attack original animation has been lately – but I borderline couldn’t stand this movie. I can’t be alone in this.
K-Pop Demon Hunters is the very definition of a “Kid’s Movie” vs a “Family Film”. It is a light and sound show to keep small children occupied. There is no reference or theme or anything an adult can cling to here the likes of which we had in early Pixar movies. Almost every line of dialog, joke, piece of witty banter and song is cringe-inducing. Everything the movie does it does to a big loud 10, particularly the way it characterizes it’s three heroes. The ladies of Huntr/x are pitched to us as so super-humanly capable they can sing, kill demons and make a spectacular entrance to their show all at the same time and then with equal extremity cram down the point that they are just like us. They like to eat ramen and lay on the couch just like us. And we know that because they chant for their couch with a mouth full of ramen.
The music is all sound-alike low-rent, studio autotuned versions of any other radio pop song that’s come out in the last decade. All self-aggrandizing and the lyrics exact parallels to what they’re doing and feeling in that point in the story. “Takedown” is the soundtrack to demon fighting, “How It’s Done” is the girl’s showing us their effortless skills. “Golden” spells out their emotional conflict of living two lives. One day they’ll live up to how awesome they were born to be. Everything is obvious, blunt, one dimensional and on-the-nose.
Also, for those keeping a keen eye out for tropes, Demon Hunters’ story arc is a textbook example of how not to write your lead characters. Sonic and visual cues aside, this is almost scientifically a bad movie. It follows favorite structure of movies starring badass, impossibly perfect female leads. As we know, teh tried-and-tested story arc of the hero’s journey starts with a character with a flaw having to overcome that flaw to accomplish their goal in the end. But because these movies are all about collectivist, positive representational Girl Power and to say that an individual character has a flaw would be to say that all girls have that flaw. When your characters have to represent an entire group, they can’t actually be characters, they have to be symbols. You are to look up to them. And you are to really look up to the perfect ladies of Huntr/x because they are, after all, world-famous pop stars.
So, K-Pop Demon Hunters goes the Captain Marvel route. It gives its main character Rumi (the one with the blue braid that looks like Jinx from Arcane: League of Legends) a secret demon scar that she thinks is shameful but turns out to be her biggest weapon. She just needs to believe in her true herself and she will go from very powerful to slightly more powerful. No trails, tribulations, learning and growing needed. You are perfect just the way you are. This is how it’s done, done, done for lazy studio scriptwriting everywhere.
To be clear, this trope isn’t bad because it self-aggrandizes little girls, it’s bad because it’s not a satisfying story. Your character is the same at the start and the end of the story. So beyond just being annoying, seemingly written by adults that don’t know how teenagers actually talk, K-Pop Demon Hunters is not a very good movie and I am totally find standing by myself in this side of the internet being the only one to say as much.