Review of The Man from Nowhere (2010) by Scott L — 08 Apr 2018

An incredibly violent, brutal, and visceral movie with a LOT of heart.

This movie feels like a passion project, it has a lot of beauty in it, but although sometimes it's executed in a bit of a clumsy and on the nose way. The cinematography here was surprisingly great, some really pleasing shots here. The music was pretty fitting, but used too much and not very subtly or creatively. The pacing stumbled a bit too.

The action, oh man, the action was insanely good. So fucking visceral and gritty, choreographed really well. The knife action was intense. Probably the best knife fighting I've ever seen.

Now the story starts out pretty simple, but gets a whole lot darker than I expected. Which is dumb of me to say, because I should know by now that Koreans aren't afraid to explore some really fucked up things in our world. The plot mostly makes sense, but some of the motivations are shown in a bit of a clumsy and blunt way. A bit more subtlety would probably work better.

Ultimately, it's a very satisfying movie that keeps you interesting, and makes up for it's shortcomings with a whole lot of passion. It left me with a good taste in my mouth, I didn't feel like the film was marred by it's somewhat clumsy execution at times. Another great Korean movie.

Edit: Forgot to mention the morbidly hilarious villains. Such over the top pure evil. One of them reminded me a lot of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Very fun character.