No Mercy For the Rude Review
How you feel about new Korean hit-man comedy No Mercy For the Rude will depend almost entirely on your feelings towards leading man Shin Ha-Gyun. While far from the biggest box office draw going in his native land Shin is unquestionably one of South Korea’s most consistently challenging and charismatic performers moving easily from cult far such as Save the Green Planet to big budget feel good picture Welcome to Dongmakgol to edgy, extreme pictures such as Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance without missing a beat. If there’s anything Shin can’t do on screen he has yet to give any indication of that fact and his offbeat performance in No Mercy For the Rude is, once again, up to his impeccably high standards. The film itself, though, seems curiously caught between competing impulses and not quite sure what it wants to be which leaves it feeling strangely flat, particularly on those rare occasions when Shin is off screen. Is his presence enough to overcome the tonal issues? The Weinsteins seem to think so, having bought the picture for North America, but I personally can’t imagine who they think they’re going to sell it to.
Shin stars as a solitary, leather clad, mute-by-choice hitman with a fondness for bull fighters, leather and knives and a code of conduct that has him accept hits only against evil men or those with frightening or rude faces. If you’re kind and soft spoken you are safe from his blade. But what is this mute-by-choice thing? Turns out our hitman hero has a serious speech impediment brought on by a too-short tongue, an impediment he finds so embarrassing that he simply refuses to ever speak. He is killing people only to raise funds to visit an overseas specialist – recommended to him by a urologist – who promises to correct his speech for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. And offbeat hitmen seem to be the norm in this world, with Shin’s professional colleagues including a karate master who turned assassin following the financial collapse of his dojo and a ballet dancer turned killer after his dance career was cut short by a knee injury and who wants to raise funds to buy a warehouse to convert into a haven for would-be dancers.
An assassin who kills only people who are rude or frightening with a best friend who is a killer who’d rather be a dancer? Throw in the bullfighting fetish short-tongue angst and it sounds as though you’re dealing with an intentional cult film here, a genre bender going for offbeat laughs. And No Mercy For the Rude certainly is that, at least to a degree, and when it goes for it it works quite well, but it has aspersions to be something more as well and things work much less well when the attempt to blend other elements comes into play. While Shin is certainly capable of playing the action scenes straight – and does so very well when called upon to do so, he could very easily be a straight up action star should the mood to do so take him – the film moves somewhat awkwardly between the comedy and action, never quite striking the proper balance between them. And when you throw in the family drama elements that come into play when our hitman friend takes in a homeless child and grifting hooker the tone becomes even less cohesive.
Where does the problem lie? Is it the acting or direction? Doesn’t seem to be. The story element is laid out reasonably well, and there’s obviously an enormous amount of technical skill behind the camera – the film looks great – and all of the principal players are excellent. The root issue seems to be with the script, a script that is content to leave too many characters as little more than rough sketches – acceptable if you’re playing broad comedy but not at all as soon as you introduce a dramatic element – and that is FAR too reliant on voice over narration. Shin may not speak but he is constantly narrating, a device that is almost always the kiss of death. The film would be far better off had they made the decision to have him simply speak or not speak, to either give the man some actual dialogue or allow his physical skills to tell the story. Instead they have tried for some sort of middle ground that fails to satisfy. Film is a primarily visual medium and any film that needs to tell you what is happening rather than simply showing you is a film that has failed, and this is a film that is constantly telling rather than showing.
The new Korean DVD release is simply stunning. The film comes packaged in a lovely, fold out three disc set that includes the feature (English subtitled), a disc of bonus features (Korean only), and a soundtrack CD. The transfer is excellent and the subtitle translation generally very strong though it does show the peculiarly Korean urge to use contractions everywhere, even when obviously inappropriate. You also get a photo book of promotional images and stills from the film.
No Mercy For The Rude is not a bad film per se, but it is a very frustrating one – a film that simply misses the potential of its own premise. Shin is as entertaining and impressive as always but the films other issues lower something that could, and arguably should, have been a little cult classic into something far more blandly pedestrian.
