Nowhere to Hide
December 22, 2000
Director Lee Myung-Se gets South Korea into the action
By Kimberly Chun
Writer and director Lee Myung-Se throws every high-impact filmmaking technique at the screen, just to see what would stick with his most recent action film, Nowhere to Hide. The director doesn’t hide his influences — they’re great ones: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter and John Woo’s The Killer. These films’ imagery are used like ammunition in Lee’s super-violent battle for the attention of viewers jaded by car chases, gunplay and multiplying body counts. Toss in a soundtrack that mixes trip-hop, Bernard Herrmann-esque suspense and speed-metal, as well as MTV-style visual verve, and you might as well surrender to Lee, the new pulp-fiction enforcer in town.
In Nowhere to Hide, the cops carry clubs instead of Magnum 45s; they look like baby-faced and broken-toothed Charlie Browns rather than hard-bitten and handsome Dirty Harrys; and they race by foot down the narrow streets of South Korea, rather than San Francisco. But the basic elements — the heroes, the villains, the moll and the crimes — are all recognizable. The action opens on a courtyard filled with young lovers and children, strewn with gold gingko leaves. The rain starts to pour, and a bespectacled fellow takes shelter in an alcove, only to be encountered by an intense but compassionate-looking man. As the man with glasses holds his hand up, blood begins to stream down his face beneath his spectacles. We realize that he’s been killed by the quiet stranger, Chang Sungmin (Ahn Sung-Ki).
Hot on the trail of this drug-world killing are Detective Woo (Park Joong-Hoon) — a relentless, brawling and brutally playful detective with a chubby face and a taste for floppy hats, striped shirts and bowls of ramen — and his more sensitive partner Kim (Jang Dong Kun) — a dead-ringer for the lead character of Akira. Shortly after the killing, the pair meet at a restaurant, where Woo borrows a lighter from a stranger, who turns out to be Sungmin himself. Following his intuition, Woo goes to the bar labeled on the lighter and ends up running down a drug trafficker, Fishhead. The captured Fishhead leads them to someone involved in the caper, Meathead, whom Woo tackles a comic book rooftop fight scene that resembles both the tightly choreographed movements of Westside Story and manga comics with its partially animated shots of fists whooshing through the air. The scene cries out for word balloons reading, “Kerpow!” and “Karunch!”
After yet another lead, Woo and Kim narrow the search for Sungmin’s girlfriend Juyon (Choi Ji-Woo) and her rarely seen and always-silent boyfriend heats up.
There’s a flight-and-fight scene on a train with disguises, mistaken identity and cash blowing away in the wind — a sequence that resembles Lars von Trier’s Zentropa; then a stop-motion, mad-rush of an action scene in an apartment’s cramped corridor that recalls the ballet-like death dances of Sam Peckinpah; and a mud-slinging, fist-flinging showdown that brings to mind the best of John Woo.
An intentionally humorous interrogation scene at the police station, however, is the most revealing: The cops alternately clobber the boxer Meathead — to the point that he literally has boot prints on his face — and then feed him a bowl of ramen. The black comedy is both an unexpected relief and a sign that Lee not only revels in the conventions of the operatically violent crime genre — the heavens are forever loosing torrents of rain, or filled with twirling snowflakes, or blanketed with film noir shadows — but he also has a healthy sense of irreverence.
It’s not surprising considering the director has dipped into romantic comedy, closely observed drama and love stories in the past, and is considered one of the most imaginative directors in the late-1980s Korean New Wave. The only danger is that he’s too good at these police stories and that he’ll get typecast as an action-movie visionary, the next John Woo.
Nowhere to Hide opens December 29 at Lumiere in San Francisco.
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