1999 | 112 MIM | Action
DIRECTOR LEE Myung-se
CAST PARK Joong-hoon, AHN Sung-ki, JANG Dong-gun, CHOI Ji-woo
RELEASE DATE Jul 31, 1999
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Nowhere To Hide (1999) provided a kind of turning point to director
LEE Myung-se in two respects; the first is to try action genre for the first time unlike his previous romance and comedy films and the second is to shoot on various locations from his peculiar sets.
The film starts with action states of gangster like detective WOO Young-gu (
PARK Joong-hoon) alone. The next scene shows that killer CHANG Sung-min (
AHN Sung-ki) murders in a trench coat which is usually detectives wear. The murder case on forty steps is a main plot, which depicts detectives including WOO Young-gu and KIM Dong-seok (
JANG Dong-gun) pursue CHANG for 72 days.
As “I wanted to do everything that I could.” said the director LEE, Nowhere To Hide has almost every way of action direction. The film uses diverse filming techniques such as black-and-white and freeze-frame for each location from warehouse, train, narrow alleys to abandoned mine. Moreover, the type of actions covers convention of western films, samurai films and comic books. The last scene of the film is one-on-one fighting between WOO and CHANG, which was mentioned for its similarity with that of The Matrix Revolutions.
Director LEE planned
Nowhere To Hide as the first of the detective trilogy. However, the second project about the Hwaseong serial killings fell apart when
BONG Joon-ho’s
Memories Of Murder (2003) was released. Instead, LEE continued his action experiments by directing periodic detective thriller
The Duelist (2005).