Not that good

Rating: 5/10 (15 August 2017)

A farmer is stopped at some decontamination checkpoint. There's some leak at a biotech plant.
Next we meet the boss of some investment firm. He's of course too busy to pay attention to his young daughter who wants to visit her mom in Busan. The dad finally agrees and they make it to the train station. On they way there's something going on, lots of emergency vehicles are driving somewhere. As the train departs zombies attack the train station and one actually makes it on the train.
This zombie attacks some train attendant who bites another one and so on. Here the transformation into a zombie is near instantaneous. Depending on the needs of the script it may happen right away or it may take a minute or two. When eventually the passengers catch on what is going on, they run to the front of the train while the zombies end up in the rear. But by now the condition is spreading all over South Korea. The train isn't allowed to stop somewhere, communications are interrupted.
We meet several characters: a pregnant woman and her tougher husband, two older women, a young baseball team, an even more arrogant and selfish business guy, and the train conductor.
They do stop in some town where people would be quarantined by the military. But when they arrive and leave the train the military personnel is also infected. So it's back on the train but this time a group is in the back another in the rear. The ones in the back--our heroes--have to make it to the front where people are so freaked out they won't let them in.
Things get grimmer and we'll have to see who actually survives this disaster as they get closer and closer to Busan.
Train to Busan is a long, slow, melodramatic thriller with zombies piled up--I guess that's going to be the new trend thanks to World War Z, piles and piles of quick zombies. Despite the penchant for drama there's little dialogue and the characters' behavior often doesn't make a whole lot of sense mainly because for some reason they have nothing to say to each other. The zombie action is quick, somewhat unclear, individual zombies matter little but masses of zombies falling out of train cars like cockroaches are emphasized. None of it is particularly scary or frightening, which it should be given that the humans in a train have only two places to go- to the front or to the back. There's not a whole lot of gore or violence. What is good though is the setting of a zombie movie in a train; and I also liked that the movie takes place mostly during the day.
It's surprising that while this movie does point out the soullessness of business people it also makes one of them the hero. We do get some sense of Korean values--rigidity, deference to authority, overemphasis on education as a solution to all ills.
I can't quite understand the high score of this movie. It is perfectly mediocre and stands out in no way whatsoever.