NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE
** out of *****

Reviewed by David Cormack

Screening in the 2007 New Zealand International Film Festival
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Genres
Action
Comedy
Thriller

2006
Written and Directed by
Cheol-Hee Park
Cast
Jeon Sangyoon
Yoon Jihye
Kim Minjun

It’s easy to dismiss a film’s failings when you know it has a low budget. "Oh it worked within its boundaries” you might say. This is bollocks.

Take The Blair Witch Project, yes I will cede that the movie had a very successful marketing plan. BUT, and this is key, despite it being cheap as chips to make, it didn’t look  cheap as chips. It appeared to have high production values. The same cannot be said for No Mercy for the Rude. It looks cheap. The bar scene looks like a cheap soundstage was set up, scenery wobbles a bit and it’s all very off putting.

Sadly for this film, it’s a Korean film that deals heavily with violence and follows the trail of an anti-hero which lends itself immediately to Park Chan Wook’s “revenge trilogy” (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance), but where Wook was able to create beauty from brutality, No Mercy’s director Cheol-Hee Park has managed to conjure up nothing but boredom from his explosive violent scenes.

We are introduced to our lead character “Killa” via his fantasies of being a bullfighter and this theme recurs throughout the film, his desire to be what he is not but his resignation that he is what he is. Killa cannot talk because of a malformed tongue and so he is an assassin-for-hire only to afford himself the operation needed to bring him the power of speech. Questionable motives one might suggest. Early on we see Killa in action as he plunges a knife deep into the heart of the first of many victims we witness. There is nothing clever, no one-track-shots of immense fights, no beautiful cinematography, just a dude stabbing another dude then fighting in a half-assed fashion until stabbed dude dies.

The film does seem to have taken a lot of stylistic pointers from the revenge trilogies and one wonders during a number of scenes if this isn’t just out and out plagiarism (example, Killa puts up a poster of the human anatomy and practices stabbing it, in Oldboy, the lead character punches a chalk outline of a body up on the wall).

The acting is solid without being spectacular, it’s always hard to truly judge the acting of a film that is subtitled as nuance is lost.  The big redeeming feature of this film is the end, which is a twist delivered subtly (yet again not dissimilarly to the twist we see in Oldboy).

Asia seems to be churning out endless violent splatter/action flicks, there is nothing in this one to separate it from the rest of the pack.

This film will screen in Wellington at The Paramount on August 2 at 2:00pm and on August 4 at 6:00pm.

Please refer to the Film Fest homepage for more information on screenings in other parts of the country

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