Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

A Company Man Blu-ray Movie Review

Takin' care of business.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 27, 2013

Anyone who has spent even a little while sleepwalking through the fluorescent lit halls of the corporate working scene will know what a soul crushing experience it can be. People are isolated from each other—if only barely—by flimsy upholstered cubicle dividers where they pin up mementos of what really matters, their families or, many times, the outside world. Mind numbing repetitiveness tends to make each eight or nine hour shift a kind of sad, personal version of Groundhog Day. Many workers spend the vast bulk of their lives in such situations, trying to shut out their dreams as they watch the clock tick, second by second, counting the hours until they reach retirement age, at which point they may have a few years of relative freedom before they shuffle off this mortal coil. While a slight change in the cultural zeitgeist has taken place over the past couple of decades, with more and more people working from home or telecommuting, seeming to realize they should work to live, not the other way around, the global corporate structure still rules the days for the most part in most major industries. And according to A Company Man, a derivative but often quite exciting South Korean thriller that may remind some of the more visceral A Bittersweet Life, that evidently includes the assassination industry. In a buttoned down corporate environment, a midlevel flunky named Hyeong-do (So Ji-Sub) goes about his business, which is only slowly revealed to be killing people. We see Hyeong-do yakking it up with a young underling named Hun (Dong-jun Kim), including some prescient talk about following one’s dreams. Hun then leaves the truck and gets a large box out of the back, entering a building which is under heavy guard. Hun is made fun of by some obnoxious guys in the elevator, guys who it turns out seem to be undercover cops protecting a witness. Suddenly Hun is there and it’s revealed he has a rather lethal pistol with a silencer hidden in the box, with which he takes out all of the police and the witness. And then suddenly Hyeong- do is there—to take out Hun.

The hit man as corporate lackey has been an interesting subgenre in films and has had a number of high profile relatively recent entries like Looper. Purely by chance, the little remembered film The Disappearance was just released on Blu-ray and it offers a rather similar tale of a hitman caught up in the seemingly “normal” workaday world of a corporate entity that just happens to deal in death. And so if A Company Man doesn’t do anything incredibly innovative with its premise, it at least does what it does quite well, with some well staged set pieces, and an unusual love story coursing through the center of the tale.

Hyeong-do takes Hun’s accumulated wealth to his mother, Mi-Yeon (Lee Mi-Youn), where he quickly figures out she was a former teen singing sensation, and the person Hun had actually been talking about in the van with Hyeong-do before the mission, mentioning those who don’t follow their dreams and later regret it. While he initially tells the mother that her son is now overseas working for “the company”, it apparently turns out that Hyeong-do has not actually killed Hun, but only injured him. I say apparently as I was frankly a little confused by this plot element and have to wonder if something got lost in translation, subtitle wise. One way or the other, a burgeoning romance springs up between Mi-Yeon and Hyeong-do, and that only exacerbates Hyeong-do’s growing awareness that this line of work is no longer suiting him, something that really comes to a head when he’s forced to kill one of his colleagues who has gone rogue after his son was inadvertently run down by a taxi driver.

A Company Man follows the by now well worn trope of a hitman trying to leave the fold, only to find out he’s now prime target number one. There’s a certain inexorable quality to the second half of the film, but the true interest here may be its rather odd mash up of corporate dynamics with the killing game, most of which takes place in the early going. While it’s just a little odd that there’s a tony high rise that houses the company’s offices, yet Hyeong-do goes through a secret door, Man from U.N.C.L.E. style, to travel to the dark bowels of the building to get some of his marching orders (is this something else “lost in translation?”), some of the other corporate maneuverings hover on the satirical, as in a “work picnic” the whole crew attends where Hyeong-do is promoted to middle management, or a scene where Hyeong-do's imperious superior refers to the fact that Hyeong-do wanted to use a "temp" (Hun) on a job. These parts of A Company Man in fact tend to work better than the hackneyed star-crossed lovers on the run aspect.

This is the feature debut by writer-director Lim Sang-yun, who acquits himself rather well in the latter category but could probably use some collaborative help in the former. While A Company Man has a number of interesting elements, it tends to lose momentum in its second act, which is at least partially made up for in the more hyperbolic finale. But the film is rather impressively staged, with some great action moments and a nice subtext of working man’s malaise running through its somewhat predictable course of events. The performances are all quite winning and while A Company Man may not be true killer material itself, it’s a respectable first entry by a new filmmaker who may in fact be a different kind of “hit” man in the making.

A Company Man Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Company Man is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This Red One shot feature boasts the typically sleek, impeccably detailed look of this format, but it perhaps surprisingly has some problems with range of light, making several dark sequences very difficult to make out (and there are quite a few dimly lit moments in this film, as befits its kind of dour subject matter). That is more than balanced by some vibrant colors in the well lit scenes (though of course things have been color graded quite a bit of the time), and excellent fine detail in everything from midrange shots to close-ups. There are a few really beautiful establishing shots scattered throughout the film (take a look at screenshot 4 for a good example) that offer exceptional depth of field.

A Company Man Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Company Man's lossless Korean DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is often bracingly visceral, with an abundance of surround effects in some of the action sequences. The opening killing spree by Hun is a great example, where the young assassin's silencer equipped gunshots and hand to hand combat with a couple of victims provide a lot of discretely channeled foley effects. There are also a number of nice urban sequences where the bustling sounds of a busy cityscape creep into the side and rear channels. Dialogue is very cleanly presented, and the track features excellent fidelity and wide dynamic range.

A Company Man Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of (480i; 4:30) is pretty tame fare, consisting of short snippets from the film interspersed with some looks at fight choreography and the like, as well as the requisite interviews.


• Trailer (1080p; 1:47)

A Company Man Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If A Company Man had taken just a few more chances it would have been one of the most remarkable debuts by a Korean filmmaker in quite some time, for even in its present state the film offers a decent enough premise, excellently staged action and some unusually well modulated performances. But like any midlevel manager who's more intent on keeping his job than in proving his ingenuity, A Company Man tends to keep its head down and just kind of forge ahead when a few unexpected detours or proclamations of individuality might be in order. This Blu-ray does boast great looking video and sounding audio.