In South Korea, a horrifically extreme thriller can be the box-office champion of the year
Photo: CJ Entertainment
With A History Of Violence, Tom Breihan picks the most important action movie of every year, starting with the genre’s birth and moving right up to whatever Vin Diesel’s doing this very minute.
The Man From Nowhere (2010)
In the 2011 South Korean movie War Of The Arrows, a historical drama about a master archer who practically wins an entire war by himself, there’s a scene where Manchurian raiders storm into a village, killing indiscriminately and taking all the survivors hostage. And in one shot, one of those soldiers snatches a baby out of a screaming woman’s arms and casually tosses it into a well. It’s a stinging, brutal moment, and the movie treats it like a quick aside. We don’t see the woman again; nobody vows to avenge the baby. It’s just a quick little moment to help establish that these Manchurians are bad guys. But if you’ve been raised on clean, feel-good American movies, a moment like that resonates like a slap to the face. War Of The Arrows, I should point out, was the highest-grossing movie in South Korea in 2011. It was a legit blockbuster. They don’t play in South Korea.
From the mid-’80s to the early-’90s, action-movie fans who were sick of Hollywood bombast and wanted something darker and grittier had to turn to Hong Kong cinema. Directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, and, eventually, Johnnie To were reinventing the form, crafting glamorous and melodramatic gun operas and showing no reservations about killing their heroes. Nobody had ever seen anything like those movies, and Hollywood directors did what they could to rip them off. Woo even had a nice run as a Hollywood filmmaker, ripping himself off, often excellently. Hong Kong action movies are still great, and Woo, Lam, and To are all still working. But right now, South Korea is something like what Hong Kong was during that golden era.
Korean action movies are something else. As an American viewer, it can be hard to wrap your mind around how a crowd-pleasing melodrama, with lots of broad slapstick comedy and aw-cute moments, will also feature geysers of blood and people being tortured to death. In a movie like The Chaser, you can spend the whole time rooting for a deeply flawed hero to save a woman from the villain only to watch that woman get horribly murdered with just a few minutes left. A lot of these movies are excellent, with kinetic pacing and deeply felt performances and artful cinematography. And watching them, you should absolutely prepare yourself to feel like you’ve been kicked in the balls. I’m no expert in Korean culture, and I’d love to know why this one country produces movies that are so nasty and visceral, whether it’s a by-product of the anxiety that comes from having a desperate and unpredictable nuclear-armed hostile country to the north or what. (A lot of South Korean action movies revolve around North Korean agents causing havoc south of the border.) Right now, all I know is that these fuckers are making some heavy shit.
Case in point: The Man From Nowhere, the highest-grossing movie, foreign or domestic, in South Korea in 2010. (For comparison’s sake, America’s highest-grossing movie that same year was Toy Story 3.) The Man From Nowhere is a raw fucking film. It tells its story with an all-out intensity that no American action movie could ever hope to match. It gets complicated, but here are the broad strokes: A quiet, mysterious loner lives by himself in an apartment building and runs a pawnshop. The only person he ever talks to is one neighbor, a little girl whose mother is a reckless heroin addict. He acts annoyed whenever the little girl comes around, but he looks after her. The mother steals some heroin from some gangsters, and so they kidnap both the mother and the girl. And they’re not just drug traffickers; they’re also organ harvesters, and they plan to do some bad things to these poor people. So the pawnshop owner, who happens to be a former special forces assassin, has to take on this entire merciless criminal syndicate to get his friend back.
None of this is especially original. In The Professional, Jean Reno was an icy killer who bonded with his little-girl neighbor and ultimately protected her from the sadistic gangsters who murdered her family. In Taken, Liam Neeson had to get an innocent girl back from the kidnappers who treated her like a mere commodity. And there’s even a bit of Frankenstein in the dynamic between the mostly silent killer and the friendly little kid. But The Man From Nowhere is great in the way that most action movies are great: It takes an old story, and it tells the hell out of it. As the hero, Won Bin, who hasn’t appeared in another movie since, is handsome as hell, and he’s got nicely cut black suits and Strokes hair. But he’s also great at conveying coiled stillness and quiet, leonine menace. His enemies are a vivid, motley array of monsters, my favorite being the floppy-haired dandy who tries to make the case that there’s nothing ethically wrong with selling kids’ organs even as the hero is shooting a nail gun into his leg.
The actual action isn’t as carefully choreographed as you might see in a Hong Kong movie, but it’s stark and ferocious. Won Bin only reveals his fighting skills bit by bit—snatching a knife out of an assailant’s hand, casually knocking out a larger opponent. His enemies persistently underestimate him, but the best fighter among them seems to realize right away that he’s formidable: “He didn’t flinch when I fired the gun.” Director Lee Jeong-beom films all of this with sure-handed confidence. When Won Bin beats up a police station full of cops, we see only flashes of it on security cameras. Later, we follow the hero as he crashes out of a second story window, a shot accomplished when both Won Bin and the cameraman actually jumped out of that window, with the assistance of digitally removed wires, and landed on the ground.
The movie establishes, over and over, that the bad guys truly are human scum. We see a teenage girl bidding goodbye to her friends, believing she’s going home to her family, and then we see her a few scenes later as a dead body on a hospital slab. One cop who interrogates Won Bin tries to let him know what happened to the little girl’s mother: “Her heart was beating when they got her eyes. Ripped out of her head while she was still alive!” Lee Jeong-beom takes his time to build up to the long fight scenes, and when they happen they’re tense and vicious and chaotic. You get the sense, watching them, that the characters really are born killers but that they’re also struggling hard for survival, that they can be hurt and killed. The scenes build, but much of the time, they end with outside forces interrupting things and keeping the fighters from finishing each other off.
