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How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 5 December 2010
This a movie review of THE MAN FROM NOWHERE. |
“A lock on a civilian file? That’s a first.”
The Opening Night Gala starring Won Bin (Mother) is a revenge film and rescue movie rolled into one. It has echoes of Leon and Man on Fire, as a taciturn ex-army intelligence soldier, Tae-Sik, now working in a pawn shop, befriends his polar opposite - a loquacious, precocious little girl, So-Mi. Her mother is a drug addict and dancer in a club, who not very wisely decides to steal narcotics from some gangsters. She is killed and her daughter taken in reprisal. The gangsters establish that Tae-Sik cares about So-Mi and forces him to do a job for them to get her back. He is then sucked into a gang war, with the police hunting him thrown into the mix. Little does anyone realise how lethal Tae-Sik is.
The Opening Night Gala starring Won Bin (Mother) is a revenge film and rescue movie rolled into one. It has echoes of Leon and Man on Fire, as a taciturn ex-army intelligence soldier, Tae-Sik, now working in a pawn shop, befriends his polar opposite - a loquacious, precocious little girl, So-Mi. Her mother is a drug addict and dancer in a club, who not very wisely decides to steal narcotics from some gangsters. She is killed and her daughter taken in reprisal. The gangsters establish that Tae-Sik cares about So-Mi and forces him to do a job for them to get her back. He is then sucked into a gang war, with the police hunting him thrown into the mix. Little does anyone realise how lethal Tae-Sik is.
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Won Bin is virtually unrecognisable from the awesome Mother. It shows how great his performance was in that. Here he is not stretched very much, just having to look cool and mysterious with various stylish haircuts. The fights are entertaining but edited a bit too fast for full enjoyment (contrast the fisticuffs in French sci-fi move Chrysalis), and it is structured like a computer game. A far superior thriller is the magnificent The Chaser, a lesson on how to do a kidnap thriller. Don’t get me wrong The Man from Nowhere is cheesy fun, where I guess the filmmakers are going for satisfying the audience blood-lust, rather than taking an original spin, as Tae-Sik tears apart the Korean underworld tracking down So-Mi.
There are some neat touches too. You know Tae-Sik is going to be a badass, though instead of showing it straight away, his first take down is of a large guy off camera that took the police a whole stakeout to do at the beginning of the movie, which of course builds our excitement. As a thriller it is generic but nicely made.
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