9/28/2023 0 Comments Amnesiac movie reviews![]() It’s the kind of hopelessly convoluted narrative that would have been an afterthought were the action riveting.Īs Carter rampages through an endless onslaught of enemies, the pseudo-oner makes a sorry attempt to convey the doggedness of one man in the face of overwhelming adversity. In a race against the clock, he must rescue the girl and reclaim his identity, while a swarm of CIA, South Korean and North Korean agents come after him. The only known cure is a young girl named Jung Ha-na (Kim Bo-min), whom Carter must rescue at all cost or risk having the bomb in his mouth explode. The virus turns the infected into bald zombies. We are a couple of months into a viral pandemic which originated in the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ). Once accomplished, we learn as he does, little by little, of the world he must navigate. A voice of a woman he doesn’t recognise guides him through an implanted earpiece.įirst up, he must take down the armed men entering the bedroom and escape. ![]() Stitches in the shape of a cross on the back of our messiah’s head suggest the amnesia may have been a result of some kind of surgical operation. The longer version: the titular hero, played by Joo Won, wakes up in a motel with no memories of who he is or how he got there. The shorter version: there is an amnesiac who defies every law of physics, a young girl used as a human prop, a North Korean coup, and a potential zombie invasion. What we have here instead is a freewheeling spree of leaping, kicking, punching, stabbing, shooting, running and chasing all fastened together with a connective tissue that is about as powerful as a generic brand duct tape. If only he understood staging a fluid action movie is not just about the length of a shot, but where the camera is placed, and, yes, knowing when to cut. Byung-gil does possess the acumen and appreciation for the form, and he understands the strength of choreography is vital to its pacing and thrills. Compared to The Villainess, Carter is a categorical botch job. Not only did the movie burst out of the gates with an opening POV sequence of some bravura, its motorcycle sword fight sequence inspired a similar one in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. This is quite the lapse for Jung Byung-gil, the South Korean filmmaker whose previous movie The Villainess was a visceral maelstrom of incident and choreography. At best, seamless editing may have made Carter a little easier to get behind, if not substantially more watchable. Not that the visibility of the artifice is the only issue here. Egregious abuse of the green screen gives a jarring artificiality to the settings of the action set pieces. The camera switches from the omniscient third person POV to the first person on a whim, weaves in and out of moving vehicles, plunges up and down buildings, and spirals in from such dizzying angles you are bound to get whiplash. Lighting changes and spatial geography present distracting incongruities, with VFX clearly masking the cuts. The illusion works as long as the movie holds a firm grip on the viewer and its editorial seams aren’t showing. Yet, even the illusion can make for a great hook, as there is an inherent sense of urgency and suspense the conceit brings with its uncut drama. Everyone knows most one-shot movies are anything but. Leave it to the streaming giant and its mix-and-match algorithm to take the one-shot movie and gimmick it up to 11. But if you thought the counteragent for overly choppy and incoherent set pieces was perhaps longer takes, Netflix’s latest catastrophe, Carter, is here to prove your prognosis wrong. ![]() It is now more about hiding incompetence with rapid-fire cuts and special effects. What becomes clear on watching The Gray Man or Uncharted is that staging action has become less and less about precision, clarity, rhythm, or internal musicality. For the worse - it sure goes without saying. Two weeks ago, when The Gray Man debuted on Netflix, it doubled as a barometer for how far the metrics of action-movie making have changed. ![]()
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