Paper cuts are the worst. “No Other Choice,” a new comic thriller from a South Korean director. Park Chan WookYoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a longtime employee of pulp manufacturer Solar Paper, is one of many unceremoniously fired after the Americans take over the company. After months of looking for a job with no results, Man Soo and his wife Lee Mi Ri (Son Ye Jin) are forced to save money. Mi-ri finds a part-time job at a dentist's office. Their dogs are sent to live with her parents. The furniture is up for sale, Netflix is closed, and their children's future hangs in the balance. When the family's beloved home goes up for sale, Man Soo snaps. This can't go on. Something must be done.
Judging by cut-throat cinema, a subgenre as global in its reach as unemployment itself, the possibilities for this “something” are endless. Unlike the quirky heroes of Laurent Cantet's novelTime-out(2009), Man-su, at least, does not try to hide his dismissal from his loved ones. Will he patiently continue to look for work, like the freed Finnish tram driver in Aki Kaurismäki's Clouds Drifting (1998)? Or he will express his rage, like the fired defense worker in the Joel Schumacher film.”Falling Down(1993), which goes on a violent rampage on the streets of Los Angeles? The film is directed by Park, best known for his extravagant revenge thriller.Oldboy(2005), will not be a spoiler, because Man Soo does not choose the world. He plots to kill his rival, Choi Sung Chul (Park Hee Soon), in hopes of replacing him as a line manager at another paper company.
But getting rid of Sung Chul won't be enough. Man-soo, wanting to get an accurate picture of his competition, creates a fake job opening and advertises for applicants. From the resumes he receives, he deduces that there are two other highly qualified, recently fired newspaper experts, Goo Beom Mo (Lee Sung Min) and Go Si Jo (Cha Seung Won), who are more likely to be hired for Sung Chul's position than he is and should therefore be fired first. Man-soo tells himself that he has “no other choice,” which sounds like a bad mantra in the film: it’s what Solar’s new American overlords say when they kick him to the curb, and it’s also Man-soo’s excuse for not trying his hand at another profession. “Paper fed me for twenty-five years,” he declares. His industry colleagues feel a similar loyalty, and with their sudden dismissal, a similar betrayal. No Other Choice, a darkly comic tale of a breadwinner's dilemma, also explores the crisis of masculinity: Some men would kill to avoid learning a new set of skills.
“Puck's film is the second adaptation of Donald E. Westlake's satirical crime novel.”Axe(1997), which began a series of murders in the paper industry somewhere in the Connecticut area. The first, also called Hatchet (2005), was set in France and Belgium and was directed by the fascinating Costa-Gavras, to whom Park dedicated his own version. Clearly, Westlake's story can be productively transferred to any place that knows the sting of corporate mergers and restructurings. With No Other Choice, Park and his co-writers Kyung-mi Lee, Don McKellar and Jahe Lee transplanted the story to Korean soil, which turns out to be surprisingly fertile soil (you'll forgive the botanical metaphors: Man-soo grows plants as a hobby, and has a greenhouse and garden plot that are convenient for disposing of bodies). Park, always a fan of pulp fiction, both maintains and updates the narrative's focus on the paper industry and the effects of increased automation. Sustainability-focused practices have received due recognition, but so has the ubiquity of paper, which has too many uses—lottery tickets, ice cream sleeves and cigarette filters, for starters—to be rendered obsolete by the digital revolution alone.
Puck's most significant transformation is that of tone. Westlake's novel unfolds from the point of view of its culprit, who catches the opening line: “I've never killed anyone before, killed another person, killed another person.” Costa-Gavras's treatment retains the gritty, noirish tone and sociopathic voice-over, while Oldboy's meaner Park might have done something similar. However, recently in films such as “Maid(2016) and “The decision to leave(2022), both of his best works, he abandoned the extreme gore that was once his signature. There are certainly images in No Other Choice that stick into your brain like steel hooks – one shot of a corpse being tied up and compacted to facilitate burial has an acrobatic horror worthy Francis Bacon– but these days there's more winking mischief in Puck's use of violence than hammer-swinging sadism. Here he identifies flashes of black comedy in history and infuses them with a lavish, over-the-top exuberance of slapstick.
The film marks the reunion of Park and Lee Byung-hun, who had his breakout role in the director's political thriller Joint Security Area twenty-five years ago and has since become one of Asia's most popular stars. He is best known outside of Korea for his work on the series “Squid game“He's an amazingly versatile talent; I especially loved his dual portrayal of prince and pauper in the historical drama Masquerade (2012) and his stunning performance in Kim Ji Woon's I Saw the Devil (2011) as a detective driven to extremes, almost as crazy as the serial killer he's hunting. In No Other Choice, he plays a killer whose bouts of ingenuity are often thwarted by clumsy ineptitude. This the role gives Lee comic timing, and his performances are a frantic, intense physical workout, whether Man-soo is hiding out of sight, throwing himself down a hill, struggling for a gun, reeling from a toothache, or writhing on the ground after a sudden snake bite startles him at the worst possible moment.
