Korean cinema was on fire in the first decade of this new millennium, with some of its finest directors putting out films that at least dipped their toes into all sorts of genres - and given the regional characteristic disdain for tonal consistency, often all at once. Park Chan Wook's revenge trilogy is probably the best of these, but consider Kim Jee-woon putting out Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good The Bad the Weird and I Saw the Devil back-to-back. That's a run of almost Carpenterian proportions! Bong Joon Ho announced himself with Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother. And there were many others.
Imagine following up on any of these.
Writer/director Lee Jeong-beom did just that to great local box-office success with Ajeossi - a polite word for men older than yourself normally used by children when they don't know who they're speaking with (thank you google!). The film is Known as The Man from Nowhere in other territories, because Mister! doesn't sound half as badass.
To describe it glibly, it's a film that sits squarely between Man on Fire and Taken. Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) is a quiet, moody, ridiculously good-looking pawn shop owner who's taken in a stray: So-mi (Kim Sae-ron), the young daughter of a prostitute neighbour. The tiny, big-eyed girl often comes to stay over at Tae-sik's place whenever her mom is either with clients or indulging in substances.
That drug habit proves to be deadly for So-mi's mom after she steals two bags of heroin from a Chinese-affiliated gang whose activities imply an attempt to win some sort of heinous activity bingo: drug-smuggling, illegal organ harvesting, human trafficking... I didn't notice any prostitution, but that's a blessing given that they enslave and traffic small children. And harvest their organs once they're all used up.
So it's this group of deeply hateable villains that soon traces the robbery back to So-mi's mother, and kidnap the both of them. Tae-sik becomes involved because his pawn shop was (without his knowledge) used to stash the stolen merchandise. That makes him a target - but, and hear me out here, I know this might come as a shock - he's not so helpless; he is possessed of a very particular set of skills, etc. etc. That showdown leaves one man dead, shot to death by his own partner in cold blood once incapacitated by Tae-sik.
The best part: The criminal who shot the downed man, a Vietnamese hitman (played by Thai actor Thanayong Wongtrakul) later observes: "He didn't even flinch at the shots". That's some quality storytelling there.
These events send Tae-sik on a single-minded quest to rescue the missing woman and what becomes increasingly clear is his surrogate daughter. At first he lets himself be coerced into doing favours for the kidnappers (which sets him in the sights of the police detectives who are dead-set on catching the gang), and later, when it becomes clear there's no dealing with these people, he resorts to good old detective work and sweet, sweet violence.
The Man from Nowhere may be derivative but it's executed almost perfectly and with enough colour to render it much, much better than both of the American movies it closely resembles. It sprawls out to follow two sets of gangsters and the policemen trying to catch them for a while, and it even goes into Tae-sik's backstory a little - but none of this ever feels unnecessary because these scenes include, say, a cop fly-kicking a guy in a wheelchair with enough force to send him rolling backwards a few meters into a pillar. If that's bloat, it's a kind of bloat I can fully endorse.
Elsewhere, the tone is remarkably controlled. The action and melodrama are heightened, but it doesn't register that much thanks to an overriding grimness; This is a gritty, mean-spirited action film where the humour is deployed judiciously, and often in editing choices (we often jump from the moment where shit is about to go down directly to its aftermath, only for the film to loop back in later). More importantly, the action scenes are excellent and varied, combining gunfights and melee with a sprinkling of excellent car crashes. I particularly liked a final brawl where our hero gets particularly brutal to intimidate a small horde of thugs to keep the number of enemies on him manageable.
I thought Won Bin was excellent as the protagonist - a good combination of John-Wick-awesome with a little more vulnerability than you'd expect out of something like this. I'm biased, though, because when I originally watched this I had already seen Mother. The guy hasn't acted in anything else in the intervening decade and a half, which is a huge shame; Dude had chops, looks and range.
His character here is a perfect little pretty boy who goes into his action sets dressed in immaculate suits, and at one point gives himself a perfect haircut; It does contrast a little with the grittiness of the rest of the film.
There are a couple of good villains, too - the Vietnamese hitman shows off some honour and a bit of soul and is well used throughout; There's also a crazy, whiny psycho (Kim Sung-oh) who's very enjoyably over the top - it's all a little cheesy, but they both set up hugely satisfying story beats and scenes.
The action shoots for (and achieves) immediacy and intensity but it's mostly very clear even when it dips into first-person shots, there are some excellent stunts (including an impressive jump off a tall window done with no body doubles). The director is ably assisted by cinematographer Lee Tae-yoon and a score by Shim Hyun-jung to give his film some excellent ambiance. There are many better Korean movies out there, but few pure action ones.
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