A Man of Reason: a superior Korean thrillride

• Reviewed from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.

A former criminal must endure a violent reckoning with his past in A Man of Reason, the directorial debut from South Korean superstar Jung Woosung. As boilerplate plots go, it’s all too familiar; but whatever Jung lacks in original material, he more than makes up for in absurd visual confidence.

Jung himself plays Suhyuk, a quiet mob enforcer with a talent for violence. Introduced in silhouette against a black BMW, he is soon fighting his way through a gang of henchmen during a nightclub blackout, armed with only a knife and a torch. A suggestively grisly ordeal, the scene plays like an abstracted twist on the famous corridor battle in Park Chanwook’s Oldboy (2003). It is the first of several knowing, exceptional set pieces that elevate A Man of Reason above standard genre fare.

Further echoing Park’s film, Jung’s antihero is next seen being released from prison. But Suhyuk, discovering that he is now a father, is resolved to go straight. The refusal of a job offer from his former employers (the kind of shady syndicate familiar from any number of crime thrillers) soon sets the table for a kidnap-rescue-revenge tale, and a face-off with a pair of motorbike-bound assassins.

Despite a familiar story arc, A Man of Reason’s colourful characters, striking imagery and directorial chutzpah keep things consistently compelling. Jung throws a plethora of twists, tonal shifts, visual gags and class commentary into the mix, often in a single scene; one chase through an urban estate features a bracing nail-gun shootout, a comedic intervention by a child on a scooter, and graffiti commentary on local disquiet over housing. This nods to the film’s antagonists’ move into real estate, a world where Suhyuk’s blue-collar face clearly no longer fits, and one which occupies Seoul’s outer margins, where abandoned flyovers and fairgrounds provide striking backdrops as well as a neat analogue for Suhyuk’s own purgatory.

Suhyuk literally smashes the syndicate’s veneer of respectability to pieces when he drives through the lobby of their offices, wielding his car like a weapon as he fights off enemies one by one. A Man of Reason’s most thrilling scene, it underlines Jung’s chops as a metteur en scène of action; one senses the influence of Lee Jungjae and the genre-blending Kim Jeewoon. (Jung starred in Kim’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird in 2008, and in Lee’s Hunt earlier this year.) Lovingly playing with the archetypes, convoluted plotting and black humour of its forebears, the result is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of high-octane panache.