Thanks to films like Oldboy, Thirst, Stoker, Snowpiercer, The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave, and more, filmmaker Park Chan-wook has cemented his legacy in cinematic history as one of the most unconventional and ambitious filmmakers of his time. He has every right to retire and rest on his laurels, but he doesn’t! He keeps churning out crazy stuff! His latest effort, No Other Choice, is based on the Donald Westlake novel The Ax, and is yet another genre-bending experience that dabbles in black comedy, family drama, satire, and horror. There’s something for everyone in No Other Choice, and while the movie does work, which is a feat unto itself, it falls short of many other of Chan-wook’s achievements, which is more a testament to the impressive filmography he’s developed more than to the shortcomings of No Other Choice.

After 25 years, Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is fired from his job making paper and struggles to find even menial work. His wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), takes part-time work and makes the difficult decisions to cut finances, from canceling Netflix to surrendering their dogs to her parents. Man-su researches other companies and realizes there could be the exact job he’s looking for, so long as he’s willing to kill off a competitor. Not only will he have to kill off the head of this company, he also must kill the other experienced employees who would make better candidates than him. Mild-mannered Man-su is faced with either living a life of poverty with his family or eradicating his rivals.

Byung-hun is in virtually every scene and he deftly carries the picture, switching from being humble and humiliated to being more aggressive to meek and embarrassed. He pulls off the difficult task of captivating us, yet never fully making us root for him — after all, he’s attempting to kill innocent people just to get a job. Similarly, Ye-jin plays her character in a way where you can see the connection these two characters have, and while she clearly loves her husband, she’s also frustrated by what’s become of him and the things she has to do to support the family. It’s a complicated dynamic that they effectively execute, with many of the supporting characters having just the right balance of irritating and enjoyable; none of these characters deserve to die, but we can’t help but hope for Man-su to kill them to see where his story goes.

Cinematically, Chan-wook is all over the place, in the best ways possible. The moves he’s doing with the cameras, the cuts he’s making, the split-screen imagery, the matchcuts — the filmmaker is pulling out all the stops to inject an almost-cartoonish energy into the film without making the experience feel like a full-blown slapstick comedy. What the narrative itself might lack in bombast, Chan-wook makes up for with camera moves. It’s truly a sight to behold what he manages to do with a camera in this movie, especially given the illustrious and inventive filmography he’s built for himself over the years.

Listen: reviews are subjective, especially when it comes to what scares us or makes us laugh, and that’s where this movie didn’t really work for me. The whole thing is funny, but it never made me laugh; my reaction was mostly, “Heh, that was funny.” The whole thing has tension, but I was never tense; my reaction was, “Uh oh, that’s not good!” Chan-wook’s history of pushing boundaries and shocking audiences narratively and cinematically make No Other Choice almost feel like an American remake of a movie he never made. The tone just never leans too heavily into humor or thriller in an effective way, often just trying to balance the disparate themes from one scene to the next. Also not doing the film and its frustrating tone any favors is the 140-minute run time. There’s just so many stretches of scenes that I didn’t find that funny or that thrilling being strung together. It’s not that any scene is specifically poor in quality, there’s just so many of them, I truly thought I was walking out of my theater three hours after it started.

There’s a big difference between a movie being “bad” and a movie being “not for me,” with No Other Choice being firmly in the latter camp. Everything about the movie essentially works as intended, and I can’t really cite any element that fell short of expectations. People with different senses of humor from me or can be thrilled more easily might find a lot more to like as an overall experience, but I would have much rather watched any of Chan-wook’s previous efforts.

Wolfman Moon Scale