There’s no better time than now for an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s unsparing 1997 novel The Ax, an acutely observed book about downsizing as a form of dehumanization. The bad news is that No Other Choice, the Ax adaptation Korean master Park Chan-wook has been waiting years to make, isn’t the picture Westlake’s cold, glittering shiv of a novel deserves. We know that movies and books are distinct creatures, and the pleasures we find in reading are never going to be identical to those we get from the screen. But sometimes our knowledge of a book plants expectations that we can’t shake. And as fine a filmmaker as Park is—his 2003 Oldboy is a chilly, operatic masterpiece—No Other Choice is both too dully observed and too aggressively slapsticky to hit its mark. It’s a missed opportunity dressed up with proficient filmmaking.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Park takes Westlake’s essential premise—a laid-off paper-mill executive methodically and with increasing detachment proceeds to kill off the four men who are most qualified for a job he feels he deserves—and twists and tweaks it so the focus is more on the symphony of mishaps that allow the movie’s protagonist, Lee Byung-hun’s Man-su, to get away with one crime after another. It’s summertime as the movie opens, and Man-su stands at the barbecue grill in the yard of his elegant, modern house, cooking up some eels that have been sent, as a gift of gratitude, by the paper mill to which he’s been loyal for 25 years. He’s surrounded by his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), his children, teenage son Si-one (Woo Seung Kim) and younger daughter Ri-one (So Yul Choi), and two charming, fluffy golden dogs, to whom Ri-one, neurodivergent and a gifted cellist, is particularly attached. In this moment, secure in his middle-class, middle-aged state, Man-su feels he’s got everything he ever wanted in life.
Read more: Park Chan-wook on the Long Journey to No Other Choice
But soon he’ll learn that the expensive eels are really a sick consolation prize: his company is terminating him. He’s left to job-hunt, but given his age and level of experience, there’s nothing for him. Ever practical, Miri has made deep cuts to the household expenses. She’s sent the dogs off to live elsewhere, and she proposes selling the family house, which is the very one in which Man-su grew up: it had been sold out from under him previously, and he’d worked hard to buy it back. And then Man-su finally gets an interview with a company he’d like to work for. Not only does it go badly, but he’s later humiliated by the former subordinate, Park Hee-sun’s arrogant Sun-chul, who would have been his boss. Out of desperation he hatches a scheme. He’ll eliminate the two chief candidates for the job he so desperately wants, gentle, earnest Sijo (Cha Seung-won), who’s marking time working as a shoe salesman, and Bummo (Lee Sung-min), a down-on-his-luck engineer who spends his days getting sozzled. And he’ll figure out how to do away with Sun-chul, too.
Man-su’s first attempt at murder goes comically—too comically—awry; the second one is chillingly efficient. But the aggressive wackiness of that first killing, which involves much slipping in mud, an errant snakebite, and a frustrated, angry woman with a gun (Yeom Hye-ran), sets the movie spinning on a wobbly axis from which it never recovers. Lee—who may be best known for Squid Game, though he also appeared in Park’s 2000 breakthrough hit Joint Security Area—is solid in the movie’s early scenes, as a man unmoored by circumstances. He attends a counseling session packed with other middle-aged men in his exact situation, all of them left to reckon with feelings of humiliation and emasculation. This is what the greed of capitalism—likely to be fueled even further by the proliferation of AI—will do to a person.
Yet that’s barely the focus of No Other Choice; the movie’s increasingly convoluted plot only detracts from the story’s crushing emotional potential. Shot by Kim Woo-hyung, the movie has a crisp, elegant look, and Park has some fun with cleverly tilted camera angles and visually sophisticated dissolves. But where’s the poetry? If you’re familiar with Park’s work—not just with Oldboy, but also with his gorgeous, erotic reverie The Handmaiden (2016), or 2023’s graceful neo-noir Decision to Leave—you’ll know that he’s capable of so much more, particularly at this juncture, where fake intelligence threatens the very meaning of dignified human work.
In 1997, Westlake put these words in the mouth of his narrator and protagonist, the suddenly out-of-work Burke Devore, a decent man who’s driven to murder by his feelings of uselessness. Devore reflects on the way the “automated future was always presented as a good thing, a boon to mankind, but I remember, even as a child, wondering what was supposed to happen to the people who didn’t work at the dull stupefying jobs any more. They’d have to work somewhere, wouldn’t they? Or how would they eat? If the machines took all their jobs, what would they do to support themselves?” No Other Choice doesn’t come close to capturing the texture of Devore’s desperation, and it barely scratches the surface of Westlake’s fears for the future. Now that future is here, and No Other Choice reflects on its dangers not with a cry of anguish or even a dry shot of grim humor. Instead, all we get is an overcalculated, mischievous wink. It’s not nearly enough.
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