1 out of 5

Directed by: Jung Byung-gil

An ambitious as hell mess that finds co-writer / director Jung Byung-gil absolutely zeroing in on a particular “thing” at the expense of all other movie making considerations.

I didn’t hate Carter, but I found it magnificently uninvolving; I would not judge anyone for liking it, but I’d be curious if, when held up to other comparable action spectacles (later John Wicks; or certainly Hardcore Henry) there’s actually something specific that appeals as opposed to an undeniably cool vibe that the movie gives off – or arguably attempts to give off.

…But I’d argue with myself there: I do think that Carter is cool, I just also think it’s 100% style with no substance, and that that style is made for some format / audience that doesn’t really exist. Yet. There’s maybe some forward looking here to a perpetually distracted crowd that just wants to glance at their phone periodically and see some wild stunts happening, but I’m honestly not that cynical; I do think narrative and visual storytelling will nudge a movie (or show) into a more enduring memory for most, and will continue to be the case.

Anyway.

Carter is a “one shot” movie that is never really pretending to be one shot, but just appear as such. It avoids that waiting around that true(-er) one shot flicks deal with by removing any constraints on the camera, and zipping between stitched together shots – maybe some GoPro, surely some CGI – with abandon, dropping in and out of first person (from different people’s perspectives) as Byung-gil deems fit. The problem is that primacy was given to momentum, and there’s rarely an actual justification for the camera to keep zooming and swirling. It’s just to be cool. And again, it is, even if the camera-stitching is incredibly distracting, like a smash cut that’s smoothed together via computer; it develops into a visual language you quickly get used to. …And then are just as ambivalent to, as the movie just keeps going, and going, and going, literally up to the last shot. The story, to underline this once more does not matter.

I am impressed by physical presence as the titular character played by Joo Won, a memory-broken spy who’s being told by competing agencies that he’s rescuing a miracle patient – played by Kim Bo-min – and bringing her to North Korea to cure a quickly spreading disease; Joo Won is in the vast majority of sequences, and though digi-doubled at various points, and the frame rate surely sped up or etc. to give some action punchiness, you believe him – in context – as an all-ass kicking machine. That is his role: every scene drops Carter into a spot of escalating fracases – planes, trains, automobiles – where he’s juggling the miracle girl while fending off streams of thugs.

I am further impressed by what was surely very tightly choreographed scenes and mapped out shot sequences, Byung-gil figuring out how to keep that camera spinning and things in frame, no matter what.

But it’s just so unfortunately for naught when nothing ends up having any weight. It… feels cool, but it’s empty. At various points I glanced at the runtime and was shocked how much time was left, and just kind of disappointed that the clear intention was not to tell a tale, but to perpetuate the action. Every pause is just another questline setup – take A to B; go from B to C; etc. That’s arguably all a lot of movies are, but you’d generally hide the strings a little better.

Byung-gil’s preceding The Villainess could easily be said to have been the prototype for Carter, with its opening sequence following the same visual template. But Carter still feels like a beta test, doubling down on that opening for two plus hours to see how far the formula can be taken until it breaks. Byung-gil found that point, like less than five minutes into the movie, with the first swoop-de-loop of the camera for no reason, and doing some visual punchline reveals (showing us something that wasn’t previously in frame) a couple times over, already running out of new ways to apply the visual trickery.

Carter is a mess. A watchable mess, I suppose, but one of those “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” type of films.