The man from Nowhere

Here we go.

As I mentioned earlier in my introductory blog, I loved action movies when I was younger- and I still do -by the way, I feel it’s only proper that the first movie I would blog about would be an action movie.

I watched a Chinese movie yesterday and by Chinese movie, I mean the modern day Hollywood- like oriental movies   where the action stars speak ‘funny’ English and wear suits and most of the action sequences involve more guns than Kung Fu. It was not the traditional Chinese movie of Shaolin temples of monks/teachers and students with their students avenging their master’s honor or death. This realm of movies also consists of various fighting styles usually imitating animals. Any avid follower of the traditional movies would know what I’m talking about.

My modern " Chinese" movie (Korean actually) was a 2010 movie titled ‘the man from nowhere’ and as the title suggests the action star was a brooding mysterious man living next to a young girl and her mother. The basic story-line was a well-trodden path. The young girl’s mother got involved with some gangsters and that got the mysterious man involved and the police involved.

The young girl’s mother stole drugs from the gangsters; the gangsters traced her and ended up killing her and kidnapping her daughter. The ‘actor’ (as we call the action star in these parts of the world) was arrested by the police and then he escaped to try and rescue the girl while the police did some background checks on him due to the manner of his escape in which he took out 5 police officers under 5 minutes, and the police discover that there are no records of the ‘actor ‘between the year 2003 and 2009.

Now this is your regular run- of- the- mill kind of story and we can all guess how it will end so why bother watching it, right? Let me tell you why:

The acting was top notch for me even though there were a few dodgy scenes. The mysterious guy was well casted and cuts the right persona with the long hair covering his facial features and slim physique encased in a well cut suit. The villains were also typified in their various roles and due to the acting you tend to ignore the obvious and find yourself thinking up of excuses to explain the obvious gaps in the story-line. A case in point was a fighting scene in which the protagonist took on a room full of bad guys and as the lovely fight scene was going on ,the camera zooms on to the facial expression of the leader of the henchmen (who was holding a gun by the way) and the expression was that of admiration, almost as you would  watch a painter paint a canvas or an artist express his art on the highest stage and that would and can only be the reason why he did not look for another gun (he ran out of bullets prior to that scene) or bullets as the action star took down his men one by one. This also lead to the typical scene where he puts down his gun and they went head to head ,man to man ,no guns and yes  you guessed it, our action star carried the day.

Another similar but emotional scene is where the "actor" is about to blow his brains out after discovering that he has failed in rescuing the young girl, you will find yourself hoping the script writers had figured out a plot to explain how and why the young girl has not been killed.

The movie was enjoyable and with the right amount of thrills to satisfy the action buff in me and I would definitely recommend it to anyone.