by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Lee Kyung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon
Intro:
… woefully overlong for such a (ahem) paper-thin idea …
Happiness, like pride, can come before a fall. This is the story of Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a man who in his own words “has it all”: wife, kids, lovely golden retrievers, rather plush house and rewarding job (with a paper manufacturing company). Then, he is abruptly sacked, and everything goes very quickly pear-shaped.
What follows is groaningly predictable, because he soon reveals a plan to ruthlessly [SPOILER ALERT] “eliminate the competition” for a job back in the industry. How he attempts to do this is both Machiavellian and brutal; it all gets convoluted while remaining simple at its core. Inanely so.
No Other Choice contains one very funny line, better not revealed, and some lesser but very mildly amusing paper-fixated ones. (e.g. “Your lips are softer than the highest quality tracing paper.”) There are moments of poignancy concerning the young daughter, who’s determinedly uncommunicative but a potentially brilliant cellist … And the film looks good — it features some superfluously showy camerawork, but also a quorum of cleverly apt shots taken from overhead or — for example – from the bottom of a whisky glass … The irony and resolution at the end are neat enough, and more broadly, you could see the whole thing as a satire on bourgeois aspirations or the vicious competitiveness of the capitalist system.
But all that is clutching at straws, because none of it stops this from being a feeble movie. The recurrent slapstick about people falling over gets very hammy indeed. At over two hours, it’s woefully overlong for such a (ahem) paper-thin idea, and banality is still banality — even when it’s being parodied.
South Korean cinema tends to punch above its weight, not least when it comes to black humour, but as you’ll have already gathered No Other Choice is an exception to that rule.
