No Other Choice
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Lee Ja-hye and Don McKellar, based on the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
Starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin and Park Hee-soon
Classification 14A; 139 minutes
Opens in select theatres Dec. 25
Critic’s Pick
Downsize, or be downsized. That’s the serrated-edge message behind Park Chan-wook’s exceptionally funny, thoroughly violent new concoction No Other Choice – a mantra that is crystallized with ice-cold fervour about halfway in.
That’s the scene during which the film’s ostensible hero, a halfway-psychotic middle manager named Yoo Man-su (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun) who has been reduced to killing anyone he deems as a competitor on the cutthroat job market, gets involved in a sloppy gunfight between himself, a potential victim and that victim’s wife – who herself wouldn’t be too upset if her alcoholic, good-for-nothing husband were to be suddenly snuffed out.
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice.The Associated Press
Set to the wonderfully loopy stop-and-go tempos of the song Redpepper Dragonfly from Korean pop legend Cho Yong-pil, the scene is a wild bit of slapstick, the kind of instantly iconic moment that compels you to lean forward in your seat a few inches and make a mental note to revisit as soon as possible.
In its deft balancing of dark comedy, unbearable cruelty, surprising drama and swaggering cinematic attitude – like every other scene in a Park film, this one feels as if it took months of careful prep to engineer – the sequence solidifies everything that makes No Other Choice such a thrilling, unpredictable delight.
From beat to beat, it is impossible to predict where Park is going with this film. Best to just turn up the volume, and trust in the rhythm that Park has set for himself. Let him lead the dance.
Park Chan-wook on the Canadian connection to his new Korean revenge epic, No Other Choice
Like many of Park’s productions – from such South Korean cinema classics as Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance to last year’s criminally underseen HBO miniseries The Sympathizer – No Other Choice is a film driven by revenge. Or at least the bloody-minded pursuit of just desserts.
In this case, the aggrieved pursuer is Man-su, a veteran executive at a paper company who is living the good life. His wife is happy inside their modern home, his kids are (mostly) well-adjusted and he’s even got two dogs yapping around his yard. But when an American conglomerate buys out his company, Man-su is tossed out without much second thought.
Unable or, more accurately, unwilling to change his ways, Man-su becomes convinced that his only way back to the upper-middle-class life he so coveted is to hunt down any competitors with similar skill sets, and murder them before they can take any open job that should be his.
So Yul Choi, left, and Son Ye-jin in No Other Choice.The Associated Press
So begins the clumsiest murder spree ever, with Man-su proving himself to have the will to kill, if not exactly the ways. In addition to the aforementioned three-way melee – which later spirals out into a kind of Chekhov’s Vietnam War-era Gun situation – Man-su’s potential executions involve duct tape and copious amounts of alcohol.
Nothing goes according to plan, but isn’t that also – Park seems to be saying – part of the grand plan in this era of late-stage capitalism, in which humans are nothing but cogs ready to be ground to dust for the benefit of shareholders? (The film is based, very loosely, on the satirical 1997 novel The Ax by American writer Donald E. Westlake.)
Park’s messaging might not exactly be subtle – up to and including a late-film moment during which artificial intelligence is introduced into the industrial machinations – but the director once again proves himself to be both a master when it comes to fusing one tone to the next. So much of No Other Choice is horrifying, yet every grim beat bounces off some unanticipated, wry surprise.
The filmmaker also seems to go to great lengths to achieve so many singularly original shots that he seems to be inventing a new cinematic language on the fly. There are some images – wild displays and manipulations of audience perspective, such as one scene in which one of Man-su’s targets swigs from his beer glass – that have simply never been seen on the screen before. That’s worthy of a raise.