No Other Choice
Eojjeolsuga eobsda

This story of a veteran paper mill manager (Lee Byung-hun) who turns to violence after he gets laid off and humiliated when he attempts to find comparable employment in a cutthroat job market wears its subtext on its sleeve. Maybe my expectations were too high for Park Chan-wook (the innovative South Korean director of Joint Security Area, The Vengeance Trilogy, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave), adapting a novel by Donald E. Westlake (the versatile American crime novelist who wrote more than 100 books under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Stark; not to mention the terrific screenplays for films like Cops and Robbers, The Stepfather, and The Grifters), but this film fails to find the blend of black comedy, social satire, and thriller elements that we would expect from this director working with this source material. The lack of narrative depth causes the themes about white-collar obsolence caused by automation, and the lengths middle-aged, middle-class workers will go to maintain their social standing, to feel more thematically opportunistic than thematically timely. At 139 minutes, this is also about 40 minutes longer than most other films adapted from Westlake novels (except Costa-Gavras' version of the book, Le couperet, which is even longer).