K-Pop Demon Hunters

Directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, K-Pop Demon Hunters follows three singers (Arden Cho’s Rumi, May Hong’s Mira, and Ji-young Yoo’s Zoey) as they attempt to balance their careers with their demon-fighting side gig. It’s an unapologetically larger-than-life premise that is, for the most part, employed to egregiously slick and woefully uninvolving effect by Kang and Appelhans, as the filmmakers, armed with a surface-level screenplay written alongside Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan, delivers a blisteringly-paced endeavor that contains little in the way of attention-grabbing elements – with the pervasive arms-length atmosphere compounded by interchangeable protagonists and a recurring emphasis on headache-inducing action sequences. And although the picture does, at least, boast handsome animation and a very small handful of agreeable attributes (eg that cat), K-Pop Demon Hunters builds towards a seemingly endless climactic stretch that ensures it concludes on about as negative a note as one could envision – thus confirming the movie’s place as a lowest-common-denominator misfire that doesn’t even contain any decent (read: memorable) songs.

* out of ****