I Would Like to See It: The Man from Nowhere

The moral and cultural underpinnings of the “kidnapped daughter, vengeful father (or father figure)” genre are only slightly less regressive than your average police union, fantasies of justified and hyper-competent violence in defense of the purity of a virginal child, stories the most far-fetched element of which is that men can or would protect their daughters. The Man from Nowhere certainly falls prey to every last pitfall of movies like Taken and Leon: The Professional, getting bogged down in treacly sentimentality, letting the plot lag as we go back over exposition we’ve already heard — but probably its worst failing is that it whisks the heart-rendingly cute and funny grade-schooler So-mi (Kim Sae-ron) offscreen almost as soon as her character is established. Like leading man Tae-sik’s (Won Bin) tragically dead wife, she’s more a device used to motivate the relentless killer than a person in her own right, and the absence of her charming onscreen chemistry with Bin makes everything afterward feel flatter and duller by comparison.

Not to say Lee Jeong-beom’s movie is without its pleasures. The action is outrageously gory, full of severed fingers and faces battered into bloody incoherence, and even the shlockiest of its stock action story elements are pitched up to true grotesquery. The flashback in which Tae-sik’s pregnant wife is killed when their car is struck by a garbage truck is practically hellish, thick red gore oozing from the twisted wreckage like salsa from a jar. It’s strange how far Lee is willing to push the envelope when it comes to violence when his visual and narrative storytelling is so rote, but the end result is still a cut above the bloodless state of modern American action cinema. Even the rampant over-lighting, which washes many scenes into a kind of blue-white glow like something out of an office park, can’t outshine the film’s vicious brutality. There is an appealing cruelty to it, a grisly and fundamental disrespect for human life.

The film’s best-known visual and tonal imitator, 2014’s John Wick, swaps gore for whimsy as its secret ingredient, and in so doing reveals the thinness of the formula. Without real violence to brace its flimsy story, there’s little left to recommend either movie. Jeong-beom’s, at least, has some heart-stopping camerawork, as when Tae-sik crashes through a second-story window into the street and the shot rushes out after him through the shattered glass, imparting a sudden and shocking feeling of weightlessness before his plunge to the pavement below. This kind of thing, along with the superlative supporting work of Song Young-chang as impatient drug lord Oh Myung-gyu keeps The Man from Nowhere entertainingly watchable even at its weakest.