NOWHERE TO HIDE (1999)
Directed by: Lee Myung-Se
Starring: Park Joong-Hoon, Ahn Sung-ki, Jang Dong-Kun

One of Korea's biggest blockbusters, NOWHERE TO HIDE is an action film that eats itself, a Vincent Minnelli car wreck; it's an eyeball orgasm, a freaked-out hysterical scream, a comedy, an experiment, an action flick that grinds your bones to dust and leaves you gasping. Not since Alfred Hitchcock or Suzuki Seijun has a director so delighted in the purely visual aspects of physical action, using every element at his command to represent emotional and physical states. It's abstract expressionism captured on film and it will make you drunk.

Detective Woo (Park Joong-Hoon) and his tribe of knuckle-dragging, head-banging cops burst onscreen in a random gang fight swinging their baseball bats like coked-up orangutans. High school bullies stuffed into suits oozing an unwashed crotch-scratching, fist-swinging sexuality, they live on nicotine and beer coming alive only when chasing a suspect to ground and beating him within an inch of his life. Cut to: radioactive yellow gingko leaves swirl as master criminal, Chang Su-Min (screen legend Ahn Sung-Ki), assassinates a nameless target on the Forty-Nine Steps. Blood flows like a river as the Bee Gee's "Holiday" plays and Chang disappears into the late afternoon rain. Woo, with all the instincts of a hunting dog, smells trouble and the chase is on.

These cops live for the chase and their pursuit of Chang Su-Min eats up their lives. Based, loosely, on a real criminal who became a national folk hero as he eluded the police, Chang won't lie down and say die even when faced with an apartment full of cops or a gun to his head. His Zen performance dominates a film full of Keystone Kops, so zazzed up on the thought of chases to come that they can barely keep their cars on the road.

Lee delivers more than a movie, he delivers a life experience. Using a battery of smash dissolves, double exposures, rear projections, telephoto lenses, and a juddering, seizure-inspired editing style the movie continuously breaks down for beautiful interludes of shadowplay, over-ripe moons, and unexpected monsoons. Director Lee Myung-Se is known for his comedies and romances and NOWHERE TO HIDE is part comedy, part romance (between a man and his job), part action film, and part hallucination. Look at the screen for one second and this movie will stick funnels in your eyes and pour itself in.