Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, his long-gestating adaptation of Donald E Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, arrives at a squirmingly apt moment.
A savage satire about downsizing, AI encroachment and the psychic violence of work, it ought to feel like a knife to the ribs in an era of random mass lay-offs, alienation and corporate euphemism.
Instead it lands as something more cartoonish and off-kilter: the mise-en-scene is meticulous, the violence intermittently darkly comic, but the effect is tonally various and curiously blunted.
Lee Byung-hun, the Front Man in Netflix’s Squid Game, stars as Man-su, a loyal paper-industry executive who opens the film grilling eel in the garden of his eerily pristine home, corralling his family into a blissful group hug and saying, with a sigh, “I’ve got it all.”
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Within hours he has been callously discarded by his American-owned company and ushered into group therapy sessions where similarly humiliated middle-aged men chant affirmations.
Jobless, adrift and increasingly broke – the Netflix subscription will have to go! – Man-su convinces himself that there is only one way back into the workforce: eliminating the competition. To this end he creates a phoney paper company, luring potential rivals to their doom.
Park retools Westlake’s bleak premise into a grotesque symphony of mishaps, leaning hard into slapstick. One murder attempt spirals into mud-slipping farce, snakebites and panicked improvisation; others are chillingly swift. The tonal imbalance never quite settles. The action is murky.
What gets lost is the novel’s cold fury at human obsolescence. No Other Choice is sharp on the rituals of corporate masculinity and bourgeois pride, less so on the mechanisms that produce them.
The repetition of Man-su’s killings becomes ritualised rather than revelatory, the Looney Tunes choreography eclipsing the capitalist critique. The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.
Park remains a virtuoso stylist. Kim Woo-hyung’s crisp cinematography, Dutch angles and elegant dissolves make for a pleasing, if tart, cocktail. Keeping pace with the stylish director, Lee excels as a man flailing between shame, rage and manic resolve, while Son Ye-jin provides quiet moral ballast as his pragmatic wife.
In cinemas from Friday, January 23rd
