"In case you hadn't heard, it's tough out there for a working man. Even the most dedicated employees, like paper company manager Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) in No Other Choice, can find themselves "let go" when corporate consolidation makes them redundant to their new multinational capitalist masters. As Man-su tells his firm's American purchasers-or tries to before he's brusquely dismissed-another way to describe losing one's job is "getting the axe," a casually murderous linguistic acknowledgment of the life-and-death stakes involved."
"Desperate, Man-su adopts a cruelly efficient strategy for obtaining employment on a par with his previous career. He places a fake advertisement for a position demanding a resume matching his, then sets out to bump off all the potential competitors who answer it. This dog-eat-dog approach comes from Donald E. Westlake's 1997 novel The Ax, adapted here by director Park Chan-wook into an unexpectedly comic tale that could easily swipe the title of Park's 2002 feature Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance."
An experienced paper company manager loses his job after corporate consolidation and confronts severe household cutbacks, including his daughter's canceled cello lessons, his son's canceled Netflix subscription, and the loss of the family dogs. Desperate, he posts a fake job ad tailored to his own résumé and systematically eliminates applicants who might compete for the position. The plot derives from Donald E. Westlake's novel The Ax and is adapted by Park Chan-wook into a darkly comic tale that satirizes mechanized labor and capitalist alienation. Visual references evoke Chaplin's Modern Times, and the film deploys bluntly comic violence, including a concrete flowerpot as a weapon. The narrative suggests a grim reciprocity in treating people as interchangeable amid corporate indifference.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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