Recensioni de* critic*

It slips back and forth from high-octane chase to slow-motion slapstick ballet to noirish, rain-soaked romance, the way an old-fashioned Hollywood musical changes up song styles.

Some critics objected at the time, but their complaints were ill founded. While this might be a bad film for certain impressionable types to watch, it’s so blatantly a shallow—but stunning—exercise in pure style that condemning it on moral grounds seems pointless. If Nowhere To Hide is “about” anything, it’s about making every single shot as preternaturally cool as possible.

Lee Myung-se’s film is full of ideas from the very start... Every moment seems painstakingly considered and composed, with nothing left to chance or improvised... There’s a sense of ‘B movie’ subject matter given ‘A movie’ quality and scope.

First and foremost, Nowhere to Hide is about Lee's visuals. Taken on a shot-by-shot basis, it's certainly one of the most stylish films out there. Alas, while individual moments come together beautifully... too often the film and its visuals feel disconnected, self-indulgent set pieces.

It has a little of John Woo and Ridley Scott, and Myung-se Lee's direction provides for plenty of expertly shot thrills and a good performance from Joong-Hoon Park... Atmospheric, certainly, but in the end this procedural is by the book.

[Nowhere to Hide] is a work of committed and often dazzling artifice... Even without the odd discreet touches of CGI embellishment, Lee's work on the images is original enough to confirm that he's a world class talent.

As if all too aware of the super-slim story which he himself has concocted, the director not only coats every scene with the deep, shiny gloss of a commercial’s director but – presumably to force an air of mystery – has you peering into the gloom (there is hardly a scene not shot at night or in the shadows) to work out what is going on.

As an action movie, it's a featherbrained mess: At any given time it's almost impossible to figure out what's going on, and we never find out the reason for the murder that sets the story in motion. And yet, especially in its first half, the picture is something to behold, a novelty store of ravishing and outlandish effects. Lee picks and chooses his images, his camera angles, even his film stock, with so much care that the action often takes a backseat.

[Lee's] pacing is masterful, the numerous fights and chases are enthralling, and the cinematography, by Jeong Kwang-Soek and Song Haeng-Ki, is consistently beautiful, a lush tone poem about the texture of light, rain, and snow. Unfortunately the film derives much of its power from the childlike thrill of beating the shit out of our enemies. If Nowhere to Hide were easier to dismiss as art, it wouldn’t be nearly as troubling.

This is flash in the service of nothing, the proverbial sow's ear doing an indifferent imitation of a silk purse.

“Nowhere to Hide” reveals that in Lee Myung-Se Korea has a filmmaker with enough razzle-dazzle and visceral appeal to rival Hong Kong’s--and Hollywood’s--John Woo. Like Woo, Lee doesn’t resort to flashy technique merely to show off but instead to pull us into the heart of what his hero is feeling and experiencing.

Visually-striking, technically stunning, daring with genre and very funny, the film seems to slide effortlessly across nuances of mood and feeling to create both a tension and a sense of play that rivet the audience from the first shot to the last.