Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax” offers a trim story of downsizing in the corporate world, following a laid-off man who identifies the four candidates most likely to land one of the few jobs that he feels can preserve his livelihood, and murders them. This guy isn’t Hannibal Lecter, he’s your neighbor. Anyone who has lost sleep over a bill or a job interview will find his desperation inescapably understandable, his evil an extension of dog-eat-dog ethos. This story is still relevant to a world with skyrocketing life costs and tales of A.I. eliminating jobs, and I was impatient to see what the gifted South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook would do with it as a movie.
“No Other Choice” is the sort of mixed bag that’s familiar to Park, a prodigiously talented filmmaker who nevertheless often loses the pulse of a story. It’s operatic and has the most masterful staging of any movie that was first released last year. I could sit with you over cake and coffee and talk about this movie’s sequences with you all day, and for that alone, “No Other Choice” will be catnip for cinephiles.
Style is important to me too and I am in awe of Park’s élan here, but it’s also at odds with Westlake’s novel. Put starkly, the author’s matter-of-fact writing is creepier and more perceptive than Park’s gamesmanship. We’ve got plenty of stylish international thrillers, even if few of them are at Park’s level of play, while art that’s in tune with the widening gulf between the gilded set and the working class is in short supply.
Most audacious, and ultimately unsatisfying, is Park’s decision to stage this material as a farce. How blunt are we talking? The movie opens with a sequence that ends with Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) and his wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), and their children embracing out in the family’s beautiful yard while Man-su exclaims under a ray of majestic sunshine just how good they have it. It’s knowingly cheesy but cheesy all the same. A few minutes later, Man-su has been laid off by the paper mill that employs him and is going about the humiliation of trying to find jobs for which he is to be trained by former protégés.
Park packs a lot of texture and detail into these sequences. There are pointed shots of trees being chopped down for the paper mill, playing up the company as a destroyer of the earth and employee dignity. There is an emphasis on the globalist intrigue of paper corporations gobbling one another up. There are dark, absurdist flourishes, such as the sunlight that’s concentrated by a glass office panel into a ray that blinds Man-su during a job interview, throwing him off his already lackluster game. I appreciated this scene’s parody of one of the stupidest and most condescending questions in the interviewer canon: What are your weaknesses?
Throughout, Park unleashes a series of dazzling tracking shots that should shame the gimmickry of most modern American cinema. Man-su’s home is a masterpiece of set design, with an open layout and porches and patios on multiple floors that allows Park and his collaborators to frame each family member in a different part of the house in single set-ups, showcasing their initial privilege and casual isolation.
Later in the film, there is an astonishing shot where the camera pulls back from a close-up of Man-su’s prey into a master image of the countryside, with Man-su in the foreground surveying him. The spatial coherence of this movie’s set pieces is extraordinary, pulling you into the mechanics of Man-su’s murder quest.
But the unstable comic tone keeps pulling you out of the movie. The ruthlessly pragmatic murders of the Westlake novel have been traded for elaborate, skillfully staged slapstick that wears out its welcome. For instance, it takes Man-su three visits, each rendered at length, to murder his first rival, who is a disappointing caricature. For another instance, there is an elaborate costume ball, seemingly pulled out of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” that embodies the growing tensions between Man-su and Mi-ri. Did we really need a ball for that? Park keeps adding detours, drifting from the matter at hand.
Some violence is staged for pathos, some for horror, some for comedy, and sometimes all of these tones and emphases co-mingle here simultaneously. Park appears to be going for an anarchic vibe in which “anything goes,” and often this approach works, as in a scene in which two respective murder plots ingeniously climax not only in the same scene but on differing planes in the same shot. But Park keeps losing the story’s center. His legendary 2003 thriller “Old Boy” was all over the place too, but the visceral violence and late-inning shocks gave it a unifying gravity.
“No Other Choice” is impressive, and my fondness for it has grown since first seeing it a few months ago, but Park has blown a brilliant novel up into a gonzo art gallery for obsessive formalists. Admirable as the movie is, it’s easy to shrug off.
Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” is a more ordinary crime thriller, albeit with a promising blend of talent. Carnahan is responsible for 2002’s intimate and lacerating “Narc,” which is among the best bad-cop movies I’ve ever seen. A lot of trash followed that movie, but Carnahan’s recent “Cop Shop” and “Boss Level” were fun and stylish entertainments, scum-bucket thrillers pulled off with panache. Joining Carnahan here are best bros Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with a supporting cast that includes Steven Yuen, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, and Catalina Sandino Moreno.
What we have here contains neither the penetrating highs of “Narc” nor the gratifying surface pleasures of “Cop Shop.” For the most part, “The Rip” is crime-movie sludge as usual. The first act is promising, with Damon and Affleck as part of a high-end task force that’s about to confiscate an enormous amount of drug money from a stash house. The cartel knows its money is about to be boosted, and dirty cops are everywhere, including maybe Damon, who changes the story of how he heard of this stash every few minutes, setting off Affleck’s suspicions.
It is fun for a little while wondering who is compromised, and Carnahan springs a few elegant effects, such as the coordination of nearby house lighting that reveals that the entire neighborhood is under the umbrella of the cartel. We are primed for a siege thriller, hopefully in the tradition of John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.” Instead, Carnahan delivers a convoluted plot and forgettable action that’s rendered in the sort of anonymous digital imagery that’s familiar to streaming movies. Cop movies are famous for their grit, while many of this movie’s shots could come out of a mediocre video game.
There’s more grit, on the surface, in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” as it wants very much to be the next “Dog Day Afternoon.” It is undeniably dressed for the part, as the 1970s-era textures are understated and convincing, especially for a modern period movie. But the narrative is muddy, to the point of being in ridiculous taste, and the lead performance by Bill Skarsgård is a significant miss.
The true-life story told here belongs to Tony Kiritsis (Skarsgård), who in 1977 took Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage, holding the man for 60-some hours while media attention swelled to the national level. Giving the movie its lurid title is a wire that Kiritsis uses to connect a shotgun to Hall’s neck. If a sniper should try to take Kiritsis out, it’s game over for Hall, a mortgage broker whom Kiritsis believes to have scammed him out of his land. This turns into a David and Goliath story, and the public roots for Kiritsis as a grassroots defender against the Man.
Van Sant and screenwriter Austin Kolodney seem to accept Tony as a hero without irony. It’s a sop to the frustrations of modern times, which parallel the turmoil of the 1970s, an era notable for the sort of insane violent news stories that are unsurprisingly cropping up again today. When the populace feels hopeless, incapable of earning a livelihood and ground into the dirt by a corrupt ruling class, blood will flow. There’s a fine line between understanding the rage that creates a Kiritsis and giving into blood lust as a means of condescension, and the filmmakers here cross it.
The script isn’t even very good at manipulating our prejudices. It is distractingly murky over the matter of whether or not Hall and his father (Al Pacino) defrauded Kiritsis out of his land, which he hoped to turn into a shopping center. Maybe Kiritsis simply could not make payments on his mortgage. The latter possibility seems much more likely to be true, but it is inconvenient to the filmmakers’ moralizing. The Van Sant of “To Die For” and “Elephant,” shrewder and more disturbing explorations of media and violence, would’ve been comfortable digging into this narrative’s irreducible nooks.
Nineteen-seventy-five’s seminal “Dog Day Afternoon,” in which Pacino played a man who became a hero for taking hostages in a bank, managed to walk an impressive tightrope between empathizing for the protagonist and looking at his actions askance as indicators of a society’s fissures. Pacino’s performance as Sonny Wozniak is maybe the greatest of his career, and, given that Pacino is my favorite of all actors, I do not make such claims lightly. He makes Sonny intensely real, pitiable and dangerous, twisting you in knots. Skarsgård is not up to such a task, at least not with this script, turning Kiritsis into a dweeb whose delusions are tiresome rather than telling and poignant.
“No Other Choice” is now playing at Movieland, while “Dead Man’s Wire” is in theaters everywhere. “The Rip” is now streaming on Netflix.
