Rating 6/10
Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a longtime employee at Solar Paper whose comfortable life falls apart after a corporate takeover. Although unemployed, he assumes this will be but a brief detour. However, it stretches into a year of low-pay retail work. The threat of losing his home also looms. After a humiliating interview, he realizes there are fewer papermaking jobs than qualified candidates. Faced with that reality, Man-su hatches a desperate scheme. He posts a fake job listing to flush out his competition and see exactly who stands between him and employment. As the résumés of his rivals pile up, the question becomes, How far is he willing to go to reclaim the life he believes he’s owed?
Donald Westlake’s The Ax has been adapted before, most notably by Costa-Gavras in Le Couperet, a satire of corporate disposability. Park Chan-wook takes a different approach. No Other Choice is a bleak South Korean tragicomedy that aims at capitalism. Comparisons to Parasite are unavoidable. Class-conscious allegory is part of the cinematic air. Park charts his own course, but the tone is all over the place. Tension, pathos, and farce are mashed together in awkward ways.
Man-su grows increasingly unhinged as his authority slips away. Early on, the mood is whimsical. His fabricated hiring opportunity is an elaborate trap, the rival applicants verge on caricature, and Man-su’s schemes border on comic exaggeration. The long buildup to the first major crime takes its time, but it builds momentum. His first victim, Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), is a washed-up professional drowning his failures in drink. Perhaps a grim preview of Man-su’s possible future. Beom-mo’s wife (Yeom Hye-ran) is a frustrated actress with a sharp personality. Her resentment turns their interactions into slapstick. Park’s odd tonal shifts make sense here, and it’s where the filmmaking is most captivating.
As the story wears on, the humor is less funny, and the pacing starts to show. Park commits to a bleak, anti-capitalist vision in which killing is framed as a justifiable response to a system already designed to be cutthroat. The moral fable grows even more heavy-handed. Professional indignities and wounded pride are not a natural prelude to multiple murders. One grotesque homicide involves a funnel and ground beef. Yet the narrative asks us to embrace his behavior. In doing so, it dulls the impact of Man-su’s depravity. What begins as an energized comedy loses power. I admired the craft but didn’t feel the impact.
There are episodes that connect. One scene finds Man-su arriving late to a costume party to discover his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), dressed as Pocahontas and dancing with her handsome dentist boss (Yoo Yeon-seok), also in stereotypical Native American garb. Man-su stands out in the military uniform his wife picked out for him. He fumes about looking like a nutcracker and not matching his wife. She calmly points out that he’s Captain John Smith, and it’s their daughter’s favorite Disney movie. It’s a reversal in which he’s put in his place and a nice reveal that their marriage is stronger than he thought. Still, over nearly two and a half hours, these moments don’t coalesce. For me, a movie’s strength lies in how it sustains your interest. No Other Choice too often lets that grip slip away. It’s a good film, just not a great one.
01-01-26