

Even when the artillery is whipped out, it's often used in a very inspired way, such as when a sheet of bulletproof glass standsīetween Tae-sik and his next target. There's nailgun-fu, a heroin-fueled death trap, and straight-up goring with some kind of circular blade. That's another thing too: these are intensely physical encounters, not just a bunch of people ducking behind cover and blasting away with submachine guns, and the choreography is inspired enough to not play like some kind of masturbatory martial arts showcase either. These fight sequences are spectacular, and much like the brawls throughout Taken, they're dazzlingly swift, brutal, and elegant.kind of like a ballet, only with a lot more knives. The anticipation builds to the point that its inevitable release makes it all worth it. Each attack reveals a little more, leading up to fully unhinged, unflinching violence once the counter approaches the hour mark. Say, a bloated thug will start running towards Tae-sik, the camera cuts outside to a barred window shattering, and it returns inside to find an unconscious badnik on the floor and the ghostly force of destruction marching forward for round two. It's an unconventional but wildly effective approach. In the same way that nearly half his face is obscured by his hair and what little we know about him comes in slow, deliberate drips, the audience is kept at arm's length from the action for nearly half the movie. The Man from Nowhere keeps Tae-sik in the shadows for quite a bit of its runtime. He's an unyielding force of pure vengeance, and he's carving a bloody path through the city's dark, sticky underbelly on his way to rescue So-Mi. 'Course, Tae-sik's not exactly helpless, and there's a reason the military has all records for nearly a decade of his life so tightly locked down. Since some of the heroin wound up being smuggled through Tae-sik's pawn shop, he gets ensnared in this whole mess too, caught in the crosshairs of the police, a rival gang, and these unflinchingly brutal thugs. These guys aren't so much the types to let insubordination like this slide, so they've also snatched So-Mi, enslaving her as part of a network of pint-sized drug-runners. She's fucking over the wrong people: a pair of brothers who aren't just slinging drugs around but are in the human organ harvesting game too. So-Mi's mother is a stripper who moonlights running heroin, and she's decided to hold onto some of that stash for a little extra spending money.

The only person he really talks to at all is So-Mi (Kim Sae-ron), the spunky little girl next door who saddles up next to him as a very reluctant surrogate father. The place is swarming with rumors.is he a pedophile? A gangster? If Tae-sik is even aware of those murmurs, he shrugs them off, content to keep guzzling glasses of milk and tending for the little potted plant on his windowsill.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) is a quiet, shadowy figure holed up in a dingy apartment building.

Halfway through, he got a copy of Taken in the mail and figured.ooh, let's do that instead. I'm picturing a Korean screenwriter feverishly hammering out a remake of Léon, and There's not really anything in the extras for The Man from Nowhere that spells out what the development process was like.
