But the film’s most devastating weakness is much less cerebral. Unfolding largely within a very short stretch of an obviously digitally created cable-stayed bridge, and reliant on slight set pieces involving dogs that look only mildly threatening, Project Silence betrays a limited scope for invention.

Kim made his name with more modest human dramas such as The Sunshine Boys and Familyhood, and he seems an odd fit for bombastic blockbusters that demand brawn as well as brain.

Project Silence begins at a high-level government meeting on how to resolve a protracted hostage crisis abroad.

The suggestion, however practical, is abruptly dropped there and then, and the next scene shapes Jung-won up as a misunderstood widower father as he argues with his teenage daughter (Kim Su-an) as she readies to leave for studies abroad.

The clichéd domestic conflict is then again shunted aside as the pair get stuck in a messily choreographed multiple-vehicle pile-up, an incident that somehow lets loose a cage of genetically modified dogs that the authorities are trying to eliminate.

These stock characters take their turns to usher half-baked twists, misplaced comedy and forced sentimentality as they engage in much unoriginal and unconvincing shouting, swinging of golf clubs, and selfless sacrifice.

But the most interesting conflict – between Jung-won and Hyun-baek, who is forced to literally throw his best-buddy underling to the dogs for his own political survival – remains only faintly sketched.

With that part very much muted, Project Silence becomes merely a tediously clanging catastrophe.