No Other Choice Review: Lee Byung-Hun Goes Full Psycho Salaryman In Park Chan-Wook’s Wild Job-Hunting Thriller
The latest from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is South Korea’s pick for the Best International Feature Film category at next year’s Oscars.
No Other Choice (NC16)
Starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Korean uber-director Park Chan-wook loves dilemmas.
Dilemmas which make folks, driven to the last resort, do inexplicable, absurdly violent things.
From the 2003 vengeful thriller, Oldboy, to the 2022 romantic mystery, Decision To Leave, Park pushes his characters to attain some kind of unknowable, enigmatic conclusion.
Lee Byung-hun, plays You Man-su, a paper-industry veteran and devoted family man — wife, two kids, two dogs, idyllic house, beloved greenhouse — who loses his job of 25 perfect years to corporate ruthlessness. He goes nuts in plotting the elimination of his competitors for a rare vacancy one by one. “You must disappear for me to live,” he reasons.
Son Ye-jin is Miri, his practical, supportive missus, who stands by her man despite shrinking comforts and growing questions. Particularly her hubby's Dexter-style sneakiness in said greenhouse.
Gotta say — paper, trees, plants, recycling. Kinda makes the man a bizarre eco-Dexter.
Okay, No Other Choice, nutty, funny black comedy-drama, isn't Park's best offering of extreme human misbehaviour because it's topsy-turvy uneven. You aren't sure whether to tremble or chuckle when some poor unemployed sap — everyone's fighting for a job here — gets murdered since comedy and drama are mixed together in an unholy, distractingly jokey way.
It's based on the late American author Donald E. Westlake's thriller novel, The Ax, about a laid-off paper man turning bonkers. Allowing director/co-writer Park, a humanist peddling brutality, to get that inhumane downsizing-economy monkey off his back.
You's first kill of a hapless man whose wife is cheating on him is a farcical-comical one — botched attempts, deafening music, crazy snake bite — which makes us laugh at him as a clumsy, nervous hitman-wannabe. But his second, involving a sympathetic, kind victim with a young daughter, is so stone-cold cruel and savage it scares us into silence.
You balk at Park's unbalanced handling as you basically don't get how any person, even after being unceremoniously kicked out, can regress to such insane animalistic papa-bear methods to provide for his brood.
“I'm fighting a war for our family,” You declares. Seriously? Who does this? Time for CDC vouchers in Korea?
Thing is, Park's juxtaposition of reality and un-reality, so suitable in fantastical one-track revenge tales like Oldboy, doesn't quite gel here in this abnormal normalcy.
But make no mistake. This is still a Park Chan-wook film and still a top-draw heckuva entertaining pic filled with details of small ironies within the big ordinary which Korean filmmakers, especially Park, excel in.
Some label this the new Parasite. No. It's Paradise Completely Lost. The layers here, unlike in the former, are more blunt and less clever.
Park, though, has two big-name weapons on his side.
Son Ye-jin, the supporting one, is very no-nonsense enjoyable checklisting the cost cutting needed — house, car, dance and tennis lessons, dogs — as we wait for her one big takeover scene that doesn't come.
Since everything here hinges on Lee Byung-hun going terrifically unhinged in twitchy funniness as a besieged pulp man turning into pulp.
With jumpy eyes and nervy smiles, he's a sad sack really worth recycling in this homicidal Garden Of Eden. (4/5 stars) out in cinemas
Photo: Golden Village Pictures
