Park Chan-wook probably hit peak cultural clout with 2003’s Oldboy. No Other Choice reminds us yet again that he’s still here, and has been knocking out good films ever since. If The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave and a clutch of others don’t quite get the coverage that Oldboy and the other two films of the “Vengeance” trilogy did, that’s more our problem than his.
In fact Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance would better be described as the “Sympathy” trilogy, since that’s their currency. But in the crazy-busy world of the attention economy Vengeance sells and Sympathy comes across as a bit wafty, so Vengeance it is.
Which brings us to No Other Choice, a return to the idea of the manipulation of an audience’s sympathy in the shape of a “hero” who sets about killing a lot of people in a simple attempt to improve his own life.
It is the great Lee Byung-hun – star of The Good, the Bad, the Weird, I Saw the Devil and Keys to the Heart (not forgetting Squid Game) – as the guy in question, a salaryman called Man-su who loses his job at a paper company, tries in vain to get another job, and then decides that the best course of action is to kill everyone else who might be in line for the next job that comes up.
It’s a jaunty farce in most respects, though Park takes a good few pops at corporate culture’s relentless affirmativeness, its hijacking of the private sphere and its insistence on total loyalty (none offered in return).
At work Man-su (Lee) was an obsessive, that’s what made him good at his job. Now, deprived of a captive audience of junior employees forced to listen to his disquisitions on the respective qualities of different types of paper, he turns to bonsai, and spends his days in the greenhouse bending the little trees into shape.
It’s the notice that the mortgage company is going to foreclose on the family home that spurs Man-su into action. He can take everything, it seems, but not the loss of the house where he grew up, attached to which is the greenhouse where he now hides.
In case we didn’t get the message about the strangely dependent psyche of the corporate male, we meet a second main character – Bummo (Lee Sung-min) – another unemployed paper guy, an “analogue not digital” fanatic who insists on vinyl records and uses a typewriter. Though all his wife can see is a guy who’s lost his self respect now drinking himself to a standstill every day.
Man-su and Bummo are analogues of each other – any closer and you’d say digital copy – and eventually, of course, they’re going to face off in a to-the-death fight over a job.
That’s the strategy of the desperate male – kill. As for the desperate female… both men have wives, the long suffering Miri (Son Ye-jin) and Bummo’s spouse Ara (Yeom Hye-ran). They’re much more subtle, much more resourceful, and simpatico, quietly the real heroines of this story.
There are a thousand more plot turns than laid out above, with subplots involving the wives, the kids and various victims who get in the way of a coveted job, with fate throwing a spanner in the works already gummed up by bumbling male uselessness.
Both Lees are very good, but Lee Buyng-hun gets most of the spotlight. Man-su, the guy constantly being caught out by “developments”, making it up as he goes along, thinking he has a strategy when he’s barely got tactics, self-delusional in the extreme.
It’s a strange film. Genre and yet not genre. At war with itself at some level, regularly dropping the ball only to pick it up again with an interesting little plot turn. Now farce, now thriller, with family life pitted against corporate culture, male intransigence set off against female flexibility, the comedic against the gruesome. Park – and this is very Sympathy – yanks us this way and that.
That little drinking scene in which the sworn-off-booze Man-su plies a rival with alcohol. It’s extremely funny but it does end with one person having died by inhalation of vomit.
Park wants this to be his masterpiece. I don’t think so. It’s simply too hectic and insistent. And in any case he’s already made Sympathy for Mr Vengeance – which is hard to beat. I’ve not seen Costa-Gavras’s The Axe, his 2005 take on the same source material, Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax. But watching No Other Choice makes me determined to seek it out.
No Other Choice – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
