★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Capitalism is a bitch. Have you just lost your job in a tight economy? Are the bills piling up? Do your wife and kids hate you for canceling Netflix? After 25 years of devoted service, this is what you get? Don’t despair. South Korea’s Park Chan-wook has just the movie for you. It’s called “No Other Choice.” And it gives you a choice when other downsized workers line up for the same job that you want. Kill the bastards.
Is Park kidding? Not really. The filmmaker known for such crime dramas as “Oldboy, “The Handmaiden” and “Decision to Leave” is no stranger to murder. But the streak of dark humor that runs through the farce of modern life is also his calling card. His film is based on the 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” which was adapted once before in 2005 by Costa-Gavras. Park, who has been trying to get this film made for 20 years, makes it completely his own.
As ever with Park Chan-wook, there are tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on, but with a rigorous fix on the growing dehumanization infecting our world.
Our protagonist, Mansu, acted with witty bravura and growing resentment by Lee Byung-hun (the Front Man in “Squid Game”), is definitely no work slave. He’s a manager at his paper company and lives snugly and smugly in a picture-perfect house with a matching family—wife Miri (Son Yejin), teen son Si-one (Kim Woo Seung), cutie pie daughter Ri-one (Choi So Yul) and two Golden Retrievers named cutely after his kids.
“I have it all,” says Mansu, setting up a series of disasters, similar to what transpires in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “Parasite.” The American owners of Mansu’s company are quick to lay him off and almost as quickly (three months) his severance runs out. Thirteen months later, all is chaos. Flirty Miri goes to work at a dental clinic and sparks Mansu’s jealousy. At a rival paper firm, an interviewer, Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee Soon), humiliates him. His temper frayed, Mansu considers dropping a potted plant on Choi’s head and then apply for his job.
Fantasy soon becomes reality as Mansu learns there are two job candidates ahead of him. Mansu bungles his murder attempts so hilariously that we laugh them off. Until we don’t. It’s a tough tonal balance for even a master like Park. Park shifts the villain’s role to the growing dominance of artificial intelligence.
As ever with Park, there are tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on. Good and evil are tackled, but with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved in showing the growing dehumanization infecting our world. Park has been trying for decades to make this passion project, a comedy with a tragedy at its core that carries in its bones the virus of what we’ve become. The intent, I think, is to make us laugh till it hurts. Mission accomplished.