No Other Choice               3 stars

Man-su is the kind of man who has it all.  A good paying job, a beautiful wife, a house in the suburbs and two children.  He is a successful middle manager in a Korean paper company and a past Pulp Man of the Year.  But suddenly an American company has bought out the company and that can only mean job cuts. Man-su finds himself out of a job and after a year of searching still has not landed a new one forcing spending cuts at home. What can a man do except kill the competition for what openings there are in his industry? This is the premise of Park Chan-wook’s comedy drama No Other Choice.  It seems I don’t see things the same as most of the critics as I didn’t appreciate the change in style going from serious drama to slapstick comedy.  There was too much of a change in tone that bothered me.  Man-su (played by Lee Byung hun of Squid Games) takes out fake job ads for a paper company to find the best candidates so he can find them and murder them.  Then he will be the most qualified man remaining.  The problem is that Man-su is really bad at killing, often getting mixed up in the victim’s lives. Then he bumbles his way through each situation. The movie is a long way from being plausible, but apparently that is what Park has in mind.  I wasn’t buying it, which ultimately made the movie less interesting for me. It doesn’t get my vote for Best Foreign Film Academy Award.