Korean maverick auteur Lee Myung-Se directs this wildly exuberant, genre-crunching, police-comedy action flick. Held together with only the barest of plot elements, this film is a gleeful romp through a litany of film styles and references. Following a gangland murder in a popular Seoul shopping area, bumptious, cock-sure detective Woo ( Lee regular Park Joong Hoon) and his marginally more contemplative partner Kim (Jang Dong-gun) comb the city for the killer (former heartthrob Ahn Sung-Ki). Woo
stumbles from one jaw-dropping sequence of stylized violence to another until he has his final two-fisted showdown with the killer. Nowhere to Hide was the second-highest-grossing film of 1999 in Korea and an audience favorite at the 1999 Pusan Film Festival and the 2000 Sundance Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
The film often churns with the pleasure that visual stimulation can provide and more affection for the bang-bang techniques than you're likely to see in the movies of music-video directors simply making the jump to the big screen.
Lee can't tell a story to save his life, but he's something of a visual magician, laying out glittering piles of goodies that you instinctively want to follow.
Myung-se usa o seu fiapo de roteiro para nos lembrar da velha máxima de que Cinema é, de fato, Imagem; e o resultado é um filme que contrasta os personagens falhos e incompetentes a um incrível virtuosismo visual e à trilha surpreendente.
It's absolutely chaotic to look at with visual tricks and flashy camerawork accompanying the hard-hitting, brutal, but relatively bloodless, action and fights. It's a unique little Korean action-thriller but the plot is lacking and the cops are even more brutal than the drug-dealers they're at war with, so they don't
come across as very likeable. It's fun and unique though and worth a look if you like far-eastern cinema.
April 18, 2011
Lee ?
Super Reviewer
Park Joong-Hoon is quite underrated, the movie has probably the most generic cop/crime story ever written, but the whole investigation is fun to watch. The slow-mo abuse could make even Zack Snyder cringe, but it's tolerable.
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