A man who has lost his job is willing to kill the people who stand in his way to get the job he wants so that he can keep his home and provide for his family.
After Thirst, I have not been the biggest fan of Park Chan-wook. I liked Stoker, but when you look back, the last real Park Chan-wook movie was Thirst. I was not a fan of The Handmaiden or Decision to Leave. Those two movies were a huge disappointment, and after them, I felt that we would never get the good old Park Chan-wook back.
The first hour of No Other Choice is really boring, and it looked like Park Chan-wook was about to deliver three disappointments in a row. But then the movie finally wakes up in the last hour, where it becomes much more fun and lively as he goes back to his darker humor, especially that stupid scene where the protagonist is figuring out how to get rid of a dead body with his little chainsaw. That scene is classic Park Chan-wook. And did you notice the same thing as I did? Did he not channel Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil with the greenhouse scene?
The protagonist is a messed-up and pretty despicable character. Do not expect much character depth in No Other Choice. It is more about how he reacts to losing his home and losing his dogs. He is a dysfunctional character, so you will never really get to know his children that well.
In the end, I have to say that I feel we have lost Park Chan-wook. He is getting old, and like most famous South Korean movie directors, they have become stale and safe, and he is not hungry anymore. Maybe it has something to do with the political climate in South Korea, where they do not want to step on powerful people’s toes, but that also makes them pretty uninteresting as movie directors these days.
South Korean movies have become stale and safe, and when the best directors have to play it safe, what is the reason for watching South Korean movies these days? God, I miss the golden period of South Korean cinema that started in the early 2000s. Those were the best of times.
If you did not like the director’s previous movie, Decision to Leave, and you miss more of his humor from his earlier days, I think you will enjoy No Other Choice. But for Christ’s sake, lower your expectations for the first hour, because it is uninteresting and not very entertaining when the movie introduces the characters. Even though the protagonist is a whimsical and insecure man, he is not that charming until he really tries to get rid of the competition.
And I almost forgot, the ending was a downer. I expected something different and more meaningful than what we got. The ending was pretty anticlimactic.