Think of No Other Choice (Eojjeol Suga Eopda) as something akin to Kind Hearts and Coronets that trades the Edwardian English aristocracy for the contemporary Korean industrial job market, and you’ll have some idea of the tricky tonal balancing act it requires. Which makes it sad to report that Park Chan-wook stumbles on some jarring shifts. The movie remains the work of a master craftsman with his own idiosyncratic storytelling signature, though the pathos and suspense of a hardworking family man driven by desperation to murder get short-changed in favor of wacky humor.
The second screen adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax — following Costa-Gavras’ 2005 French version — is by no means without pleasures. Notable among them are its gorgeous visual crispness, crazy camera angles and exhilarating zooms; its two appealing leads; its amusing jabs at capitalism; and an inventive ending that is both a victory over the cruelty of corporate redundancies and a sobering acknowledgement of the grim prospects for humans in an automated workforce.
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The director made his name in the early 2000s with instant cult hits like the operatically violent revenge fantasy Oldboy. But his intoxicating last two features, the sumptuous erotic period thriller The Handmaiden and the intricate neo-noir puzzle Decision to Leave, have seen his unerring control and painstaking attention to detail sharpened in elegant new ways. That makes the more wayward style of the new film a disappointment, particularly given that it’s been a 20-year dream project for Park.
Still, many of the director’s admirers will embrace the broad comedy and slapstick antics, even if they lessen the stakes for a protagonist who’s a thoroughly decent man until a crisis that threatens everything he has worked for transforms him into the clumsiest killer in homicide history. It’s key to Park’s handle on the material that the character retains much of his innocence, even after getting blood on his hands.
Though he’s now most widely known as the Front Man on Squid Game, Lee Byung-hun was one of the stars of the director’s first hit, Joint Security Area. He’s ideally cast here as Man-su, a paper mill manager with 25 years of company loyalty.
The promising set-up is a birthday celebration for his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin, wonderful) in the garden out front of their odd-looking but picturesque house (quirky architecture is one of the movie’s visual charms). Man-su gathers Miri, their teen son (Kim Woo-seung) and younger daughter (Choi so-yul) in a group hug under a sprinkling of cherry blossoms from the tree that spreads out above them while their two adorable golden retrievers — I mean seriously adorable — get in on the affection. It’s almost comically idyllic, which is clearly intended when Man-su looks up and sighs with gratitude, “I have it all,” something no one has ever said in a movie without immediately losing it.
In a cruel joke, he learns that the expensive eel on his barbecue sent by the mill’s management is like a gold watch kiss-off, in this case marking involuntary retirement. He arrives at work and spreads the grim news among his team that the new American owners have indicated there will be job losses. One of them turns out to be Man-su’s.
Park mines poignancy and mordant humor from a support group for recently unemployed men, where they work on their emasculation issues and tell themselves in motivational exercises that their loving families will stand behind them while they seek new opportunities. But despite a pledge to himself to land a new job in his sector, he’s stacking cartons at a big box store 13 months later.
Miri is pragmatic at home, cutting down on expenses — no more Netflix for the kids or tennis lessons for Mom — and putting the house on the market, with plans to move them into an apartment. She informs her husband that with foreclosure only three months away, it’s their only way to pay off their debts and stay afloat. She also returns part-time to her dental hygienist job at a practice where Man-su suspects the handsome dentist of having designs on her.
What most lights a fire under Man-su is the thought of losing the childhood home he worked hard to buy back, a sanctuary standing on land that was once his father’s pig farm, where he loves to potter around in his greenhouse.
He gets a tip about a position that would be perfect for him — aside from working under cocky former subordinate Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon) — at Moon Paper, one of the few companies in the sector doing well, since they cracked the Japanese market. The interview is a disaster, his disappointment later compounded when he returns, begging for work, and is humiliated by Choi.
The instinct to want to bump off Choi and replace the obnoxious hotshot comes naturally, though it occurs to Man-su that in order to be guaranteed the job, he would have to eliminate any other unemployed men with the necessary qualifications.
That comes down to just two. One is Gu Bummo (Lee Sung-min), who spends his days getting pickled in beer while his theater actress wife Ara (Yeom Hye-ran) rails at him for his pathetic surrender. She concedes that her husband is not to blame for losing his job, but his weakness in dealing with it earns her contempt. The other obstacle to Man-su being first in line at Moon Paper is Go Sijo (Cha Seung-won), a gentle-natured shoe salesman whose heart remains in the paper industry.
Park’s cartoonish humor notwithstanding, there’s tenderness toward these men, who were invested in their jobs to such a degree that being kicked to the curb leaves them nullified, stripped of their identities.
Reeling them in proves easy for Man-su, with a fake company website and promotional video helping him to weed out the serious candidates. Icing them proves harder for the inept wannabe killer, landing him in embarrassing situations with precarious stakeout positions, muddy ground to slip on and a deadly snake bite that brings an unexpected rescuer.
Lee handles the physical comedy with endearing awkwardness and remains firmly planted in the middle-ground between self-preservation and murderous intent — he has “no other choice.” But the mid-section plotting gets a bit bonkers and the emphasis on laughs tends to neutralize the thriller aspect. The film gets back on track, however, with an outcome arrived at via some unpredictable swerves and decisive intervention from Miri to fix Man-su’s bungled efforts.
Park dedicates the film to Costa-Gavras, who held the rights to the novel and worked with the Korean director in the initial development stages, when it was planned as an English-language remake. Canadian actor-writer-director Don McKellar, likely a holdover from that earlier blueprint, is one of four credited screenwriters, which may also be a contributing factor to the herky-jerky tone.
Whatever flaws there are in the execution, the fact remains that even a subpar Park Chan-wook film has more going for it than a lot of directors’ best work. And those dogs!
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