Every once in a while, a film comes along that isn’t merely a viewing experience but a sheer sensory assault, a cinematic whirlwind wholly committed to indulging in its creator’s vision and stylistic DNA. The Crank 2s, the Speed Racers, the Shoot ‘Em Ups and Hardcore Henrys, the Climaxes and Boxer’s Omens of cinema: whether one loves its audacity, despises its blatant disregard for filmmaking conventions or just suffers a headache by minute 10, Byung-gil Jung’s latest action extravaganza Carter earns its place among that ilk.
Director Byung-gil Jung is likely most known for The Villainess, a take on La Femme Nikita that was equal parts undercover agent melodrama and furious bloodshed. Sequences like its opening POV knife fight or frenetic motorcycle swordfight were so singularly striking that John Wick Chapter 3 has already paid homage to the latter set-piece. Before The Villainess, there was Confession of Murder, a bonkers send-up of Korean serial killer thrillers that pushed the familiar beats of detective, murderer, revenge, and pursuit into the realm of zany absurdity. Merge those two flavors of Byung-gil thrills, spike that mixture with cocaine and adrenaline, and the end result is Carter: a deranged two-hour kaleidoscope of maximalist Korean mayhem.
Story? Characters? Logic? Physics? Pacing? Carter has no time to entertain any of those, reducing its ostensible plot about North Korean spies and a virus threat into the thinnest narrative gossamer holding together a cascade of set-pieces. That plot kicks off with Joo Won’s eponymous hero waking up to amnesia, a CIA squad busting into his bedroom, and a mysterious voice in his head delivering instructions from an implanted microphone. Something about a rampaging global pandemic, a vaccine, a kidnapped child, erased memories and false identities; it’s a spy-thriller narrative blur that manages to include a molar micro-bomb, brief out-of-the-blue actor cameos and zombies too because why not, but none of it really matters. Carter himself barely seems to follow all the various developments and turns. The camera restlessly whirls during the film’s pace-halting exposition dumps, as if the frame can only be contained for so long before needing to explode into action. Despite feeling the need to explain itself, narrative is merely accelerant here, nonsensical fuel to keep Won’s man of action moving ever forward and a canvas for Byung-gil Jung to actualize whatever set-pieces he can imagine.
Even for action diehards, the sheer unrelenting volume of blistering stunt work and blood-gushing violence might break them. There are 10-20 minute chunks where the chaos doesn’t stop, instead just steamrolling onwards towards more carnage, another confrontation, a new arena to leave littered with corpses and wrecked vehicles. Escaping that opening CIA ambush leads to a random bathhouse packed with Yakuza (for our hero to murder in a giant blood-splattered brawl, obviously) leads to a staircase stabfest leads to a motorcycle chase leads to…and on and on, for two hours straight. The variety of action is impressive, but the budget-breaking ambitions can be jarringly shoddy. Aggressively overt CGI effects right next to incredible stunts and choreography has been a feature of Byung-gil Jung’s films since Confession of Murder, and this movie stretches that combination to its limits. Only viewers’ tolerance and tastes can decide if that is either admirable or eye-bleeding; if anything is certain, it’s that Carter is destined to be divisive.
This is a film defined by action and movement, rather than story or characters; nothing makes that more clear than the decision to film Carter as a feature-length one-take. While recent examples such as 1917 and One Shot treat that technique as a means of immersion, Carter treats its faux-one-shot approach as stylistic artifice, a license to experiment with impossible rollercoaster camerawork to link the action scenes in the most boldly frenetic ways possible. Thus to experience Carter is to experience an exhaustingly hyperkinetic display of perpetual motion, jarringly abrupt transitions between drones and GoPros and handheld cameras and back again, and an utter hostility for shot-to-shot continuity, all while Byung-gil pushes the envelope on how insanely he can escalate his snowballing spectacle.
A fight scene punching its way between three adjacent vans, a skydiving gunfight/knife fight that crashes into a Fury Road-style convoy chase, a medley of genres and influences sacrifices every shred of filmic elegance in favor of more madcap style and more outrageous action. Carter feels less like a product of 2022 and more like an artifact from the mid ‘00s, when movies such as Ultraviolet, Night Watch and Running Scared came from directors experimenting with how digital filmmaking meant the camera could go anywhere and action could be unshackled from the restraints of reality or physics. Whether that sounds incredible or insufferable, Carter remains a deliriously relentless action onslaught that should place Byung-gil Jung alongside the likes of Bay, Neveldine and Taylor et al as a director to watch for unbounded cinematic spectacle.
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