Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), the main character in No Other Choice, has a lovely house, a beautiful wife, two children, and two Golden Retrievers. As a manager at a paper manufacturing company, he considers himself a valued and respected member of society. He's living his best life.
You needn't be a fortune teller to predict that director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave) is setting Man-su up for a calamitous fall. Park deflates the balloon of Man-su's success with one piercing blow after another.
When an American corporation takes over the paper company to which Man-su has devoted his life, he loses his job and, eventually, his sense of well-being. Man-su's confidence circles the drain, awaiting the last swirl that will flush everything he cherishes away.
Getting fired in Korea, he says, is like having your head chopped off with an axe. After 25 years of loyal service, which included the coveted honor of "Pulp Man of the Year," Man-su discovers that in a bottom-line world, loyalty isn't always reciprocated.
Park’s movie has a satirical sting, but taking a step back from the story helps us understand that in some ways Man-su has allowed himself to be played by the system. If he were in politics, he’d be called a useful idiot, someone who refuses to understand that he swallowed the corporate line while never imagining that it might give him serious indigestion.
What’s Man-su to do?
To begin with, he attends a support group where displaced men try to convince themselves that they'll be okay. They recite affirmations as they tap the side of their heads, as if trying to beat positivity into their otherwise depressed brains.
It's not enough. More extreme measures are needed.
After suffering a series of humiliations, Man-su decides that he must kill a manager at a competitive company and then apply for the man’s job. But there's a problem. Because others are more qualified for the position, Man-su must murder them as well.
Park transforms a capitalist horror story into a darkly comic exploration of one man's desperation in the face of relentless automated "progress."
In every sense of the word, Man-su has been downsized. His wife (Son Ye-jin in a slyly amusing performance) returns to work as a dental technician, and Man-su winds up unloading trucks at a big-box store.
Kim Woo-hyung, Park's cinematographer, brings bracing clarity to the movie as Man'su's indignities mount. The house will have to be sold; the family might have to move into an apartment. The dogs are sent to live with Man-su's in-laws. A job interview goes poorly. A neighbor turns up with a plan to purchase Man-su’s beloved house.
How humiliating it all is.
The Ax, a 1977 novel by Donald E. Westlake already inspired a French version from director Costa-Gavras. But Park's broadly engaging approach to Westlake's work adds dashes of slapstick, off-kilter humor, and farce.
Two men (Lee Sung-Min and Cha Seung-won) stand in the way of Man-su's ability to land a status-saving a job at the Moon Paper Company, a business flush with cash because of a recently acquired Japanese contract.
Telling glimpses of the lives of Man-Su's rivals flesh out the story. Lee's character, for example, also has a lifestyle that will be difficult to sustain. His badgering wife (Yeom Hye-ran) mercilessly urges him to abandon his dream of returning to paper making.
In large part, the jokey take on the Man-su's murderous scheming derives from his amateurish incompetence. A struggle for a gun becomes a slice of broadly depicted silliness, absurd characters jostling with an absurd situation.
Park manages the movie's tonal shifts easily, including tension when needed. No Other Choice has been assembled with the confidence of a master who has made a comedy about the way so many are drifting toward irrelevance.
But not Park’s movie. By the movie's end, its relevance and stinging ironies have crystallized. I wouldn't insist that Park has made an anti-capitalist screed. As an artist, he's capable of looking beyond the moment he so ably depicts to explore the contours of human folly and its bitter consequences.
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