Films as delectably over-stylized as Nowhere to Hide are what I live for, and one of the reasons why I love South Korean cinema. Films like this and Oldboy blend action, humor, and pure craftsmanship in ways that are so damn engaging. Joong-Hoon Park chews every last bit scenery as the violent and playful Detective Woo who is hunting down the perpetrators of the "40 Steps Murders" at all costs. Said murder being one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking I've ever seen, replete with the Bee Gees song "Holiday." I liken a film like this to the work of a South Korean Seijun Suzuki, but I can totally see this being a Wai Ka-fai by way of Takashi Miike. Gloriously over the top, this style-over-substance action comedy is highly recommended for a simple, unpretentious good time.

I can absolutely appreciate the visual style(s) here, exhausting and distracting though they are, and I can admire Lee Myung-se‘s refusal to be limited by technical and visual traditions. My main issue with the movie is, in fact, far more mundane: if you introduce your cast of cops by repeatedly showing me ‘hilarious’ footage of the hijinks they get up to when they beat the shit out of and/or torture suspects, you cannot then expect me to turn around and find them adorable, or root for their success.

2021 Asian Cinema Challenge

Pure Cinema.

Grady Hendrix wrote a great article about expectations and the cinema of Director/Writer Lee Myung-Se that articulates a lot of feelings I experienced when I first saw NOWHERE TO HIDE in the early aughts. It didn’t feature the action I wanted, style I thought was satisfying, or the structure I had come to expect - so I rejected it. I’m kind of surprised that something so radical, pushing up against conventions at every turn, was embraced as ‘cool cinema’ in the hot second when South Korea cinema was penetrating North America. It has more in common with the visual experimentation of Frank Tashlin then Yuen Wo-Ping, but it makes sense, as it deals with the genre conventions of the cops and robbers stories that continue to be the country’s most prolific cinematic output.

the cinematography snapped

The more I pondered Nowhere to Hide, the more I realize that this over stylized, zany, and generally inexperienced filmmaking doesn't quite work. It's not interested in telling a story, but wishes to engage you with the hectic pacing and energy, expecting you to be along for the ride. It unfortunately peaks after the first scene but maintains the pacing in the editing and stage direction until it becomes overbearing on the rest of the film. So, if the first scene doesn't appeal to you, good luck because there's another 110 minutes of the same.

I groaned when I first saw the disgusting aspect ratio on Criterion, but the film is very stylish with a lot of fun action. However, when you make the villain more likeable than the leads, you should probably deliver a more suitable ending.

Jang Dong-gun may be a star but his character is a blank slate here, and I’ve disliked Park Joong-hoon since I saw his guest appearance on Running Man. Character development was needed to change my mind about him, and it wasn’t there. 

The Criterion version is 12 minutes shorter than the original domestic version so perhaps they cut out the character stuff?

A wonderfully avant-garde experiment in sound/music, choreography, and jagged editing, all with an intriguing Korean noir narrative in the background.

최지우의 하얀 얼굴, 장동건의 목검, 안성기의 선글라스, 박중훈의 두 주먹.

A flurry of action and genre abstraction is carried off with impressive verve and impeccable skill in Lee's gangster noir actioner, the plot blurring into inconsequentiality and the moment to moment thrill of his mixtape like filmmaking--borrowing from everything from melancholy noir and hyper-violent action to mimicking the panel-by-panel action of comics with his freeze frames and elisions.

Loved how this movie started - there was a lot of humour, which was (in my opinion) augmented by the hyper-stylized film making. The absurdity of the lengths these cops would go to nab the killer had me laughing out loud. It was fun!

And then, somewhere around halfway, it started to lose steam. The plot formula started to repeat, and the film leaned more and more into the action flick tropes. The zany, dark comedic pieces fell away. (An exception in the latter half is the fight scene on the train - soooo fun). Such a strong start with such a tiresome ending is a bit disappointing!

Stylish cops n criminals fun. It’s not deep and it drags at points, but never for too long and it’s personality carries it a long way. Just a cool action movie.

Pretty bizarre! Features the tone- and genre-mashing characteristic of other Korean New Wave movies but with none of the care for theme or even narrative coherence. If in the 90's Michael Mann had learned Korean, had a brain hemorrhage, and hired his teenage nephew to edit using an early version of iMovie, he would have made something similar to this

The soft body main detective dresses like the lead singer of the New Radicals, but the movie still convinces you he could win a fistfight with an assassin. That’s powerful filmmaking.

Can't believe I almost missed out on this one from Criterion Channel's Korean New Wave selection. What seemingly starts as a detective action film becomes infused with an experimental style that essentially deconstructs itself as it goes along. As you can imagine, the narrative gets a bit lost in the haze, preferring the visuals and editing over telling a cohesive story. Even if the film has trouble sustaining itself in the end, it still makes for an incredibly bold experiment.

I went into this expecting it to be a slick, brutal cat-n-mouse thriller, something that a Kim Jee-Woon type would make. Instead, this is a borderline incomprehensible, Godardian deconstruction of the police movie. I’d see it in a theatre in an instant.

Lee delivers one wildly exciting set piece after another until it eventually just ends, no lengthy denouement necessary. It’s a pretty successful case for style over substance.

Such is the synergistic power of music and film that some "Ruby Tuesday"-ass Bee Gees song I've never heard before - that would have made no impression even if I had - is now camped out in my head indefinitely.