YOSSER Hughes, the unstable head-butting Liverpudlian single father from Alan Bleasdale’s tender and tragic 1982 TV series The Boys from the Blackstuff, was the personification of unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain.
Yosser became a household name for his famous catchphrase, delivered in a pitch perfect Scouse accent – “Gis a job!”
Now, following in his well-trodden footsteps, Man-Soo (Lee Byung-hun), the lead character in Park Chan-wook’s latest film, No Other Choice, is the modern day Yosser. A desperate and cunning paper industry expert, he decides to murder the competition to be sure of the job he seeks to maintain his way of life.
When the paper mill Man-Soo has worked at for the past 25 years starts tightening their purse strings, he finds himself cast loose into a dehumanising job market with little or no chance of employment. With the bills piling up, dance, tennis and music lessons all cancelled, to the chagrin of his adoring family members, he decides to take drastic measures to try secure work by bumping off the competition.
Man-Soo works out who his closest unemployed competitors are in the paper trade, stakes out their daily movements, and puts a plan in place to eliminate them from further job opportunities. A devoted family man who lives to make his wife and children happy, his gruesome endeavours, he quickly realises, are not as simple, as it first appeared on paper — when it comes to carrying out the ghastly deed.
No Other Chance is far from Park Chan-wook’s finest work, but this darkly comic collage is without fault and serves as a mischievous commentary of life on the cutthroat corporate hamster wheel. Man-Soo’s frustrations and anxiety, as the years pass by, and the probability of finding work decrease, are palpable, and sure to strike a chord with anyone struggling to make ends meet in the big, bad world.
This is a totally cynical and engrossing watch.
(4/5)