Star power seldom flexes its muscles with as much impact and spectacle as in The Man from Nowhere, the top grossing Korean film of 2010. A hard-hitting and quite violent feature about an ex-special agent battling to rescue a young girl, the film sold 6.2 million tickets (worth about $41 million) upon its release in early August, proving to be equally popular among male and female viewers.
Men may have been drawn to the action, but it's no secret what was drawing the women. Lead actor Won Bin (Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War) has been a fixture at the top of the star firmament for the past decade, but his appearances onscreen have been rare in recent years.
In Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009), his first film role after returning from military service and knee surgery, he took on the challenging part of a mentally damaged youth suspected of murder, and received praise for his acting skills -- though some complained that his exceptionally good looks were a distraction in an otherwise gritty, realistic film. In The Man from Nowhere, his looks are not a distraction, they are one of the major engines driving the film. He is supposed to be beautiful, as well as forceful and charismatic, and he pulls this off better than any other Korean male star since Jang Dong-gun in Friend (2001). When I saw this film in the theater, female audiences were literally gasping out loud.
This is the second feature by director Lee Jeong-beom, who debuted with the critically praised Cruel Winter Blues (a selection for the 9th Far East Film Festival) in 2006. That film portrayed an unexpected friendship that develops between a troubled gangster and the mother of a man he is planning to kill. The friendship that stands at the center of The Man from Nowhere is not quite as dramatic, but it is memorable nonetheless.
Won Bin plays a reclusive ex-secret agent named Tae-sik who runs a pawn shop in a poor neighborhood. Spending much of his time at home, he communicates rarely with anyone except for the precocious and talkative 10-year-old girl who lives next door, who imposes herself upon him without waiting for an invitation. Her eagerness to befriend her neighbor is driven in large part by the trouble she experiences at home, living with a single mother hopelessly addicted to drugs. When the mother makes off with a stash of heroin, thugs come knocking at the door, and Tae-sik becomes the girl's only hope for survival.
Won and Kim Sae-ron (a phenomenally talented young actress who appeared in the 2009 film A Brand New Life) make for a touching pair, although personally I wished that they could have spent more time onscreen together. A much larger portion of the plot is devoted to Tae-sik's efforts to save her, which involve several elaborately staged and nastily executed fight sequences (this film is not for the squeamish). Won succeeds quite well at turning his sensitive-looking demeanor into a graceful but ruthless executor of justice. Meanwhile the villains of the film, including Thai actor Thanayong Wongtrakul in a guest performance, are sketchily characterized, but memorable in their cruelty.
In the end, The Man from Nowhere is surprisingly bleak and pessimistic considering that it had such broad appeal at the box office. It would seem at first glance to be too extreme for the mainstream, but it might be that its worldview meshes in some way with that of today's Korean audience. Average viewers may be losing faith in government and modern society, but they have yet to give up the fantasy of a tall, good-looking savior.
Darcy Paquet