Producers: Park Chan-wook, Back Jisun, Michèle Ray Gavras and Alexandre Gavras Director: Park Chan-wook Screenplay: Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Jahye Lee Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won, Kim Woo-seung, Choi So-yul and Yoo Yeon-seok Distributor: Neon
Grade: C
Should a comedy actually be funny? That’s a question posed by Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” which transposes Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax” to present-day Korea and turns what was, originally, a nasty thriller with some bleakly humorous undertones into what amounts to a satire about a pressing subject–in this case, the impact AI automatization will have on the human workforce–that slides into slapstick farce. It’s a mixture that can be successful: Kubrick pulled it off masterfully in “Strangelove.” But Park’s attempt sputters. It’s debatable whether his film will make you laugh or simply squirm in discomfort.
More than a quarter century ago, of course, artificial intelligence was something barely thought of; automation via computerization was the villainous capitalist tool then. Now the power of industrial AI is the problem, and its inexorable progress turns Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) into a murderer with a mission.
When he’s introduced, Man-su is a middle manager at Solar Paper, a factory that has been acquired by American investors. He’s worked there for twenty-five years, accumulating enough savings to purchase his old family home, which sits on his father’s one-time pig farm. He lives there with his loving wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), teen son Si-one (Kim Woo-seung), a talented cellist, and younger daughter Ri-one (Choi so-yul), who dotes on their two beloved Golden Retrievers. They’re introduced grilling some expensive eel sent Man-su as a gift by his company. And his happiness knows no bounds. “I have it all!” he exclaims.
Of course, that’s the prelude to disaster. He’s led the workers in his group to protest layoff plans to their new bosses, but when the axe falls, he’s one of those abruptly dismissed. Unable to find another job in the field, he’s reduced to a menial one, and tries futilely to lift his hopes through confidence-building classes with others who’ve been humiliatingly downsized.
The impact on his family is heavy. They cut back on spending, even cancelling Netflix (!), and when Ri-one’s teacher recommends advanced classes, it’s beyond their means. They give the dogs to Mi-ri’s parents, and she takes a job as assistant to dentist Oh Jin-ho (Yoo Yeon-seok). But none of it is enough; they might have to sell the house.
In desperation Man-su begs Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), the manager of Moon Paper who’s also a successful online influencer, for a job, but is cruelly tossed out. After being frustrated in an impulsive attempt to bean the man in the street with a potted plant from a second-story patio, he devises an elaborate plan to take his job. First, he uses a fake advertisement to identify two men whose qualifications exceed his own: Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) and Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won). He’ll dispose of them before killing Seon-chul, ensuring he’ll be the logical successor.
Armed with his father’s old Vietnam War gun, he targets wacky Beom-mo, but his efforts are complicated by the intervention of the man’s wife Lee A-ra (Yeom Hye-ran), a harridan who’s also engaged in an affair. Beom-mo confuses him with his wife’s lover, and in a tussle A-ra shoots her husband; she and her lover bury the body and Man-su, relieved, proceeds to plan the death of Si-jo, a sad-faced fellow working in a shoe store to support his family. Man-su shoots him and after ineptly trying to dismember the body in his beloved greenhouse, buries it in the backyard.
He then turns to Seon-chul, getting the man drunk during a long evening at the depressed divorced man’s home before burying him up to the neck and forcing food down his throat to suffocate him, hoping to pass off the death as accidental.
Other plot threads are introduced as Man-su stumbles through his murderous plot. He’s distracted by Mi-ri’s relationship with her boss, which makes him jealous, while she grows suspicious that his frequent absences mean that he’s being unfaithful. Si-one gets into trouble stealing cellphones from the store owned by the father of his best friend and is arrested; but Man-su uses blackmail to secure the boy’s release. Si-one observes his father’s burial of Si-jo’s corpse, leading Mi-ri to conceal the evidence. Then there’s the matter of Man-su’s terrible toothache, which he finally resolves by removing the offending tooth himself.
Despite Man-su’s clumsiness throughout, he gets away with it, largely because the police are even more inept. And he succeeds in becoming Seon-chul’s replacement, but the job turns out to be very different from what he’d hoped, as Park serves up a heavy-handed dose of irony.
The film is impeccable from a purely technical point of view. The production design (Ryu Seong-hie) is remarkable, and Kim Woo-hyung’s cinematography striking. But the pacing by Park and editors Kim Sang-beom and Kim Ho-bin is leaden, leading to a running-time of two-and-a-half hours that’s likely to test viewers’ patience. Some of the sequences feel interminable. That includes the initial murder, which is complicated, to be sure, but drawn out to a grotesque length.
Which might not matter if it were staged with skill. But the performances by Lee Sung-min and Yeom Hye-ran are so exaggerated that the couple barely come across as human. By contrast Lee Byung-hun’s deadpan shtick is simply dull. Worse, his slapstick pratfalls exhibit little choreographic dexterity; they’re just messy and overlong. (He’s certainly no Peter Sellers.)
The same problems afflict the third murder. Park Hee-soon is an equally over-the-top victim, and the comic business he and Lee indulge in is sloppy in all senses of the word. Worse, the episode in which he’s half-buried and stuffed—which might remind dyed-in-the-wool horror devotees of Rory Calhoun’s 1980 cult classic “Motel Hell”—is more disgusting than funny.
By contrast Cha Seung-won is so gentle and sweet as the second victim that his murder makes Man-su seem a monster, and the treatment of his corpse, presumably intended to be ghoulishly amusing, comes across as ugly, especially given the messy slapstick it involves. Most of the rest of the cast tend to overact, a characteristic that infects Lee in the last act as well.
Park has lavished a great deal of style on “No Other Choice,” a project he’s been obsessed with for years. But in the end a convincing tone has eluded him, and the film turns out to be a handsome but misguided misfire, a comic thriller that works as neither.