Carter Parent Guide

As the mysterious DMZ virus spreads around the world, the CIA are in Korea looking for just one man: Carter Lee (Joo Won). He is the last person known to have seen Dr. Jung Byung-ho (Jung Jae-young), a scientist working on a cure based on his daughter’s antibodies. When the CIA catches up with Carter, they find him passed out in a back-room surgery center, with his memory gone, a speaker in his ear, and a bomb in his head. A voice over the speaker starts giving him directions, and Carter soon finds himself enmeshed in a convoluted web of conspiracy, espionage, betrayal, and violence. Whether or not he’ll be able to make it out alive depends on his ability to find the truth about the DMZ virus and his own identity. But both are far more complex than they appear.

This amateurish production tries to fool us into believing it was shot in one take (which isn’t an easy trick to pull off). Since it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to shoot an entire movie in one take, movies going for that look must find places to hide cuts. Carter hides them roughly every thirty seconds, and the camera never stops spinning. The cuts don’t quite match up, though, and it’s incredibly disorienting. Characters are suddenly somewhere else, camera angles are different; even backgrounds no longer line up. Add to that some fully digital environments and some cheap green screen work (so cheap you can still see the green light on actors’ faces) and you’ve just got a big nauseating mess. If I saw this in theaters, I’m pretty sure I would have been spraying this morning’s Cheerios all over the seat in front of me or gulping down Gravol. Even watching it at home on a smaller screen leaves me incredibly dizzy. If you are prone to motion sickness, stay far, far away from this film. Even if you’re not, why risk it?

The other issue in this hot mess of a film is the English dialogue. I’m sure this is a problem with American movies shown in other languages as well, and maybe this sounds just fine in Korean, but the English characters sound bad. Really, really, really bad. Thankfully, this makes a pretty good match to the insanely convoluted and overlong plot. It’s less a coherent movie and more a bag of conspiracy theories and regional tensions tossed in a woodchipper and then committed to shaky over-edited film.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that made me quite this nauseous. While I’d like to blame that on the opening fight scene, which is about ten minutes of our hero in his underwear, stabbing the daylights out of about fifty naked men in a bathhouse, it has far more to do with the camera work, fight choreography, and unintelligible story. It’s like trying to watch the fight scenes from The Bourne Supremacy on a merry-go-round. I don’t recommend it. It’s a BYOB kind of film – Bring Your Own Barf bag.