In No Mercy For The Rude Shin Ha-kyun plays a ruthless, lonely and mute hitman, a figure which could be immediately added to a tradition made up of loneliness, bare rooms, few or no words, and distant, mysterious women.
His characterization summarizes a century of celluloid killers. However, unlike many of his colleagues, the mute killer kills for a reason, and his muteness isn't just a sign of an ascetic and nihilistic renunciation of the world, rather due to the embarrassment caused by an inborn tongue malformation. In order to raise money for an operation, he chooses to become a contract killer – an identity he can only accept if he’s a stylish killer, who stylishly kills the rude ones. He dreams of being a matador, eats nothing but seafood, and his favourite dish is oysters.
This canon variation could lead us into thinking that the movie works as an example of amused meta-cinema: the characters have no name, and the credits reduce them to pure cinematic functions (she, the boy, the killer, as in Walter Hill's The Driver), the killer's voice-over ponders why he is narrating given that he's muteb.
But a mysterious woman (Yoon Ji-hye) and an orphan child burst into the killer's life, representing a sort of redemption of reality. The movie is character-driven, and thus the plot is fueled by their depiction. Around the mute killer we see a world of outcasts, losers, every one of them with a dream to cultivate and a reality to face: his "colleagues", among them a dancing killer, dreaming about opening a ballet school, a prostitute trying to escape from the ties binding her to her pimp, the orphan child, who needs a father.
Nevertheless, the debuting director Park Chul-hee once again shuffles cards, filling No Mercy For The Rude with sudden tonal shifts, from the farcical, almost mockery moments, to the killings' brutal and direct violence, from perky, light comedy to surging melodrama.
In a puzzling movie that avoids easy categorization, strong characters and actor's ability are a handhold for viewers. The cast is very good. Shin Ha-kyun, a well-known face among the Festival's public (JSA, Guns & Talks, Welcome To Dongmakgol), proves once again all his skills and versatility in a difficult and bizarre role, at the same time ludicrous and of ambiguous cynicism, gaining the spectator's involvement with the character. Yoon Ji-hye's performance is successful too, in a very "Korean" role of a tough and fleeting woman.
Italian public won't be indifferent to the tunes introducing and accompanying the long, agonizing final tragedy: Bella Ciao (the Italian political song which more than any has become the hymn of any time and any place rebels and resistant) is a simple, linear and fascinating melody of sleek and glossy turmoil in the voice of Nick Cave's muse Anita Lane.
Curiously, this glossy turmoil could stand as a key to interpret the movie: the elegant, clear and linear visual splendor goes along with a script full of ideas occasionally getting out of control, of overabundant storytelling, invigorated by a constant tension, a narrative urge and a daring will to play with cinema, which gives us high hopes in the director's upcoming career.