What first turned me onto this film is that it is based on a novel by Donald Westlake. The Ax tells the tale of a mid-level manager with technical expertise in a shrinking industry who gets laid off. Eager to get back to work, he finds that every time a job in his field becomes available, there are a handful of unemployed guys with his same skill set hustling for it. As the months go by and his joblessness takes a toll on his family, he hatches a plot to murder the other similarly-skilled men, so that he can get the next job that opens up. It's a dark story with moments of dark humor. It's a high-wire act for Donald Westlake to occasionally inject his trademark sense of humor into what is really a horrible tale about the people left behind by capitalism and progress. As I recall, he manages to pull it off.
Park Chan-wook (“The Handmaiden” “Oldboy”) follows Westlake's plot surprisingly closely in his Korean adaptation of the story. Lee Byung-hun (“Squid Game”) does a fine job as the desperate anti-hero. I will say that Park struggles a bit with the tone. His unemployed manager's inexpert efforts at murder create some madcap scenes of comedy that are a poor fit with the theme of good, family men murdering each other over a job. Still it's a good watch and a good story about the human cost of technological progress – a good fit for the zeitgeist in the era of AI anxiety. (This isn't the first film adaptation of this story, by the way. There is apparently a 2005 French film called “Le Couperet.” Maybe I'll check it out!)
One other thing, and this isn't limited to this movie: everybody yells a lot. This seems to be a feature of Asian films in general. Characters frequently yell and act in a campy, exaggerated way. And yet, in real life here in the U.S., the Asian people I know tend to be chill and on the quiet side. What's up with that?
3 stars out of 5
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