NOWHERE TO HIDE

NOWHERE TO HIDE (1999) ***

Reviewed 3/27/00

Writer-director Lee Myung-Se floods his movie Nowhere to Hide with so much style, there's little room for content. This would be a criticism of most films, but when it is so spectacularly seat-of-the-pants, sometimes style is enough, and it almost is here. The film opens like Kurosawa's Yojimbo in overexposed black-and-white with Park Joong-Hoon's gorilla-like Detective Woo scratching himself while sauntering toward one of the movie's many action set-pieces. What follows are jump cuts, staccato edits, freeze frames, oversaturation of colors, image embossment, bizarre wipes, intertitles shot with bullet holes, you name it. One fight sequence turns from a tense showdown to a waltz to shadowboxing. Another of Lee's inspired moments takes a chase and reduces it to its most basic action -- one man running after another -- in a long tracking shot. It's amazing how much humor and suspense this simple shot elicits. Lee is obviously inspired by Sergio Leone (who was inspired by Kurosawa), and Nowhere to Hide includes some music reminiscent of "Man with a Harmonica" from Once Upon a Time in the West. Lee's intention appears to be to astound the senses, and to that end he fills the film with scattering leaves, surging rain, or spewing snow. There is little to the plot. A cop hunts a murderer. Lee could have used more scenes of character development as when protagonist Woo visits his sister or when he engages in a snowball fight with his partner, Kim (Jang Dong-Kun) (following a series of shots looking like it was taken from Kurosawa's Ikiru). The film overstays its welcome by half an hour, elongated by no other reason than Lee has simply decided it's not time to catch the criminal yet. If this film exemplifies the growing buzz on Korean cinema, then its future looks promising.