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Nowhere To Hide

1999, Movie, NR, 110 mins

Nowhere To Hide: Review

NOWHERE TO HIDE | INJONG SAJONG POLKOT OPTA
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With a little more plot, this could have been a killer. As it stands, Korean director Lee Myung-Se's thriller is a bare-bones, bare-knuckles policier, a hard-boiled action film stripped to almost surreal simplicity. When the head of a powerful drug gang is stabbed to death in broad daylight, two of Inchon's finest are assigned to solve what they believe is the latest strike in a ongoing drug war. Detective Kim (Jang Dong-Kun) is a mild-mannered sort who takes his work seriously; his partner Woo (Park Joong-Hoon), however, is the kind of rouge cop who makes Mike Hammer look like Miss Marple. Woo's credo: "If I cared, I wouldn't be a detective." Woo punches his way through a series of suspects until he reaches Juyon (Choi Ji-Woo), the pretty girlfriend of suspected killer Sungmin (Ahn Sung-Ki). Woo falls for Juyon, but as the days drag into months, the elusive Sungmin keeps slipping through his fingers. Lee infuses his Brian DePalma-style set pieces with the blithe, comic ultra-violence of Beat Takeshi, as well as his own love of visual gimmicks and optical effects. The best of these sequences opens the film: a beautifully edited, slow-motion assassination set to the Bee Gee's "Holiday." Lee makes some interesting choices — rather than actually film the requisite nightclub scene, he opts for a speedy slide-show of stills — and the film is full of personality. But for all the action, very little actually happens, and that's probably the point. Lee's far more interested in each of the parts than the whole. He finds his fun in breaking things down and seeing how it all works: A chase scene is attenuated to the point of abstract movement, and an extended rooftop scuffle between Woo and a thug named Meathead briefly breaks into dance. It's fun for a while, but never truly engaging. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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