Facing Up to “No Other Choice”

Korean auteurs seem to have a special talent for black comedy. Frankly, I have no idea why. My weeklong visit to Seoul in 1967 revealed to me a country on the move, but one that (unlike Japan) had not yet adapted to modern technology. (I stayed in a middle-class household where the kitchen was dominated not by a refrigerator but by a huge jar of kimchee.)  

 That, of course, was long ago, and South Korea has now caught up with technology in a big way. In fact, I’ve heard that the Seoul’s international airport is one of the marvels of today. Maybe it’s the rapid evolution of Korean society from third-world to first-world, as well as the current Korean domination of pop culture (see, for instance, the global fortunes of KPop Demon Hunters) that has caused thoughtful Korean filmmakers to look askance at what their world has become. Hence the success of such landmark Korean films as Bong Jun Ho’s darkly funny Okja and Parasite, the latter of which was, in 2020, the first-ever foreign language film to take home the Oscar for Best Picture.

 Bong Jun Ho is not the only South Korean writer/director to enjoy an international reputation. His countryman Park Chan-wook has also had major arthouse hits. These include the very violent, very twisty Oldboy, as well as The Handmaiden, an erotic thriller that won a standing ovation at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.  Bong’s latest, which was in the mix for several film festival awards, is No Other Choice, based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, The Ax. This has now become a Seoul-set black comedy about a world in which social and technological change are happening much too fast. (Sounds familiar, no?)

In No Other Choice, the nebbishy Man-su (Lee Byung-Hun) is a middle-aged husband and father devoted to his middle-management career in the paper industry. (Why does any mention of paper remind me of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in the Steve Carell sitcom, The Office?)  At the outset, he clearly knows he has everything he could wish for: a beautiful wife, a fabulous hillside home, talented (though psychologically troubled) kids, a sense of real personal satisfaction. But then his company, Solar Paper, is sold, and the Americans move in, replacing veteran workers with hyper-efficient machines. While his family continues to live as if nothing has changed, Man-su struggles to find work. I suspect that in today’s economy we can all identify, but Man-su’s solution is not for everyone. Methodically studying the top candidates for the industry job for which he is best qualified, he decides to bump them off, one by one. But while he might be a highly capable mid-level guy in the paper industry, he makes a terrible assassin. The film’s comedy, such as it is, involves Man-su desperately trying to get rid of the competition by any means necessary. He generally succeeds—the film definitely has its gruesome moments—but his best-laid plans often go awry in ways that not everyone might find funny.

It’s all very frenetic, with occasional detours into sex comedy involving (among others) Man-su’s pretty wife and the dentist who is her boss, and to me something seemed off about the film’s pacing. A black comedy is at its best when it all happens so quickly that we don’t have time to ask questions, but No Other Choice is 139 minutes long. Of course there’s an ironic ending. This was a film I wanted to like more than I did. By the end, I was mostly waiting to be put—like Man-su’s victims—out of my misery.