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.  

Producers: John Davis, John Fox and Craig Brewer   Director: Craig Brewer   Screenplay: Craig Brewer   Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Michael Imperioli, Ella Anderson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi, King Princess, Mustafa Shakir, Hudson Hensley, John Beckwith, Jason Warner Smith, Cecelia Redditt, Sean Allan Krill, Beth Malone and Shyaporn Theerakulstit    Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

With jukebox musicals ever more popular on Broadway and the road, nostalgia has become a big factor in live theatre.  The biographical “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical,” filled with his songs, ran in New York for a year and a half, from late 2022 to the middle of 2024, and is still on tour.  “Song Sung Blue,” a musical soap opera about a real-life Diamond tribute band, will test whether the singer-songwriter’s fans can be lured into movie theatres one step removed, as it were.

The story of Mike Sardina and his wife Claire was first told in a 2008 documentary by Greg Kohs, titled, like this film, after Diamond’s 1972 single.  Writer-director Craig Brewer has based his treatment on it, but truth be told, by the end you’ll need to pinch your arm to remind yourself that it’s telling a true story.  The beats and plot turns are so contrived and melodramatic that the picture strains credulity from start to finish.

It begins with Mike (Hugh Jackman) celebrating twenty years of sobriety at an AA meeting.  He’s a Vietnam vet and divorced Milwaukee man whose daughter Angelina (King Princess, credited by her stage name) lives with her mother in Florida but occasionally visits dad.  Mike makes a living as a mechanic, but his real love is performing as a tribute singer under the name Lightning.  He’s a member of a troupe called Legendary, overseen by Mark (Michael Imperioli), who does a Buddy Holly set, but breaks with the group after refusing Mark’s demand that he sub for a missing member by doing “Tiny Bubbles.”

But the evening is not a total loss: he meets Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson), a divorcée who performs a Patsy Cline set.  She suggests that he’s a natural to do Neil Diamond, and though he initially demurs out of reverence for the singer, he starts warming to the idea.  Eventually they link up, she introduces him to her children Rachel (Ella Anderson) and Dayna (Hudson Hensley), and they begin rehearsing as a duo.  He suggests that she take the stage name Thunder and they begin performing as Lightning & Thunder at the suggestion of Mike’s friend, dentist Dave Watson (Fisher Stevens), who introduces them to small-time promoter and tour guide Tony D’Amato (Jim Belushi). And they get married.

Initially the act does not go well, not only because Mike insists on beginning the set with “Soolaimon” rather than “Sweet Caroline” but because a mix-up lands them before a biker gang that wants hard rock; a fistfight ensues.   But things improve rapidly, and soon they’re a locally popular attraction and a happy family, especially after the initially standoffish Rachel bonds with Angelina. 

But a tragedy intervenes, putting both the act and the family in jeopardy as Claire undergoes a long period of recovery that saps her spirit.  Mike tries to hold things together, taking a job as a karaoke host and singer at a Thai restaurant run by fellow Diamond fan Somechai (Shyaporn Theerakulstit) until Claire works her way through her trauma.  But there are other difficulties—money problems, an unplanned pregnancy, and yet another medical threat which, as presented here, is dealt with, rather absurdly, through grit alone.  There’s also a severe head injury that seems to be resolved within minutes, until it isn’t.

Finally Lightning & Thunder get their big break when they’re invited to open for Pearl Jam at Milwaukee’s Summerfest in 1995, where Eddie Vetter appeared with them before a huge crowd.  But tragedy again intervenes.

“Song Sung Blue” swings uncomfortably between cheerful uplift over Lightning & Thunder’s unlikely successes and melodramatic tearjerking over their family’s sad reversals.  There are plenty of performances of Diamond songs, most in longer form than is usual in such films, and they’re very well done by Jackman and Hudson, who are equally effective in the non-musical scenes. (Jackson’s excellence is perhaps expected, but Hudson’s superb work is more surprising.)  But the seesaw effect between the feel-good interludes and very mournful scenes—which definitely dominate in the middle section—eventually takes a toll, and squeezing a two-decade relationship into a span of two hours not only results in truncation but easy dramatic clichés, as well as dialogue that’s often utterly banal.

There are genial supporting turns from Stevens and Belushi, even though as written their characters have a sitcom feel (There are far too many inserts of them applauding wildly as their friends perform, and one might wonder at the extraordinary number of times Mike’s shown visiting Watson for treatment—are his teeth really that bad?)  Imperioli brings his customary authority to a guy who gives up his own grandiose dream to serve in Lightning & Thunder’s backup band, while Beckwith is nicely laid back as Vedder and Mustafa Shakir goes big as the Jams Brown impersonator who also supports the duo.  Anderson and King Princess carry off the more serious roles of the couple’s two daughters nicely.  One might like to have seen more of Cecelia Riddett as Claire’s irascible mother and of Theerakulstit as no-nonsense Somechai.

Production designer Clay A. Griffith and costumer Ernesto Martinez provide the appropriate period requirements, and Amy Vincent’s cinematography gets the most out of them, particularly in the concert scenes, while Billy Fox’s editing handles the back-and-forth nature of the emotional shifts reasonably well.  Scott Bomer’s background score obviously takes a back seat to the musical numbers.

Those as devoted to Neil Diamond’s music as Mike and Claire will revel in “Song Sung Blue.”  Others may find that while the zest Jackman and Hudson bring to his songs is infectious, Brewer’s heavy-handedness in telling Lightning & Thunder’s domestic story is a serious drawback.