‘Good News’ (2025) Review – A Witheringly Funny and Visually Inventive Retelling
It takes some real stones to pitch a movie like Good News (2025). Sure, retellings of vital historical events are ten-a-penny, so the idea of Byun Sung-hyun (Kill Boksoon) making a movie on the real-life hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 351 isn’t remarkable. But making it a comedy? Now we’re into risky territory. It’s so easy to make a mess of that, to minimise the very real political climate that backdropped it and the human cost of how it played out. But the gamble pays off in this witheringly funny, visually inventive, and effortlessly engaging Netflix streamer.
It helps, I suppose, that the Yodogo Hijacking Incident doesn’t really qualify as a tragedy, and that the specifics of it are inherently farcical. The Wikipedia page itself reads a bit like a movie script, albeit one with less overt silliness and nudge-nudge-wink-wink political satire than what has been cooked up by Sung-hyun and co-writer Lee Jin-seong. But 130 passengers were indeed hostages of a militant communist faction intent on worldwide revolution, which must have been pretty worrying for them at the time.
Japan’s Red Army Faction took control of JAL Flight 351 with the initial intention of piloting it to Cuba, but due to limited fuel – this being only the first in a string of complications that arise for the bumbling hijackers due to how utterly inept they turn out to be at hijacking – it can’t make it that far, so the destination instead becomes communist-sympathetic Pyongyang, North Korea. Only, not really. After a refuelling stop, the hijackers were given maps of the Korean peninsula, which they could barely parse, and given instructions by in-the-know air traffic controllers that instead led them to Gimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea, which had hilariously been disguised as being North Korean. Honestly, this really happened.
But Good News isn’t content with the facts, so after a warning that all of the characters and events beyond the basic outline are fictional, thus liberating Sung-hyun from the shackles of accuracy, the whole thing is exaggerated into an outlandish pastiche of Cold War politics and book-passing middle-management. South Korea, North Korea, Japan, America, and Russia are all involved, largely represented by archetypal leadership figures who are determined to make the whole matter someone else’s problem, and a scruffy political fixer, mysteriously dubbed Nobody (Sul Kyung-gu), is enlisted as the plot-convenient go-between who makes all the pieces fit together.
The big, ridiculous moments of the real story become the standout set-pieces of the movie – like hilariously parking another jet in front of the hijacked Boeing when it stops to refuel, and then the bit where ROK Air Force lieutenant Seo Go-myung (Hong Kyung) comes up with the idea of conning the hijackers into landing in Seoul. That whole thing’s a trip, since the airport has been trussed up like a giant movie-scale production complete with costumed extras to create the illusion of a North Korean welcome.
Byun evidently loves all this. There’s a consistently playful quality to the movie’s visuals, with stand-offs over something as mundane as radio frequencies being presented as a scene from a spaghetti western, and information frequently being framed in a novel flourish or as part of some imaginative cutaway. It’s a strikingly theatrical way of making a fact-based film, but it does threaten to overwhelm that film’s ability to be anything beyond a funny aesthetic showcase, because the characters are such exaggerated cliches that they can’t be taken seriously.
What this ultimately means for Good News is that it’s brilliant, but only in a proscriptive, hyper-specific way. I loved it and found it engaging and enjoyable all the way through, despite a fairly hefty runtime, but anyone expecting it to pass as a coherent historical document will come away bewildered. This may well be the intention, but it’s a tough sell for a movie releasing globally on Netflix, where many Western viewers might lack the appropriate political context to really appreciate most of what’s being made fun of. If nothing else, though, the visual style and formal efficiency are really evident, and its ability to construct a laugh out of impossibly serious constituent parts shouldn’t be understated. Mileage may vary, and the flight can be rough, but it offers a pretty smooth landing all the same.
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