Carter - A Very Explosive & Brutal Action Thriller Movie from First Person View

After seeing its trailer in Netflix for a while, I was excited to watch this movie once it was released yesterday. I also recommended this one to my wife who watched it a bit earlier than I did and finished it at roughly the same time with me. So let's get into the movie now.

Brief Story Line

During the pandemic that hit the world and seemed to originate from North Korea, a man (Joo Won - My Sassy Girl TV series, Alice TV series etc) woke up in a hotel without his memory. While still trying to figure out everything, he heard a woman's voice giving instructions on a device in his ear and told his name was Carter. The woman who later revealed to be Han Jong-hee (Jeong So-ri - The Spy Gone North etc) informed Carter that he must complete a mission that was related to the pandemic cure, otherwise a bomb in his mouth would be detonated.

So Carter must do whatever it took to save his life while being hunted by the CIA and North Korean forces. And how would the story conclude? You can find them all in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

As I said above, I wanted to watch this movie because of the trailer which promised lots of action. Plus the story seemed interesting as well, kind of reminded me of The Bourne Identity where a mysterious man woke up without his memory but with amazing fighting capability. Anyway, this movie started off brightly with some stylish shots where the camera seemed to be flying around from every angle.

Once the fighting started (which did not take too long at all), I was startled by the graphic violence that my wife warned me earlier. The hand to hand fight were very swift, brutal, gruesome but pretty stylish at the same time. I thought it was a bit like looking at a video game where we were playing the character Carter who had to fight all the way out. At first I thought that it was a one time off, but it turned out this type of fights were done all the way till the end. While I enjoyed the cool approach and the adrenaline pumping action scenes, after a while some of the visual effects became more obvious (like the explosion scenes) and it reduced the wow effect a bit for me.

Now in term of story, the very quick pace did not allow us to really absorb the whole concept. Although it really did not matter since it was the standard kick-ass spy being hunted by so many bad guys and must use all his surviving ability to fight against the odds while trying to complete a mission. The plot itself was so irrelevant that I stopped really caring after half way through the movie and only concentrate on the explosive actions.

I have never seen Joo Won before but my wife had seen him few times earlier. She was quite surprised seeing him in this full action role as opposed to portraying romantic or goofy characters. For me my admiration was definitely of how convincing he was during the fight scenes. Aside from Joo Won there were few support cast of Lee Sung-jae (Attack the Gas Station, Public Enemy etc) as a North Korean general Kim Jong-hyeok, child actress Kim Bo-min (The Silent Sea TV series etc) as Ha-na and even a familiar face for me Mike Colter (Luke Cage TV series, Extinction etc) plus few others.

One thing that I really felt was how courageous the director Jung Byung-gil whose previous works included critically acclaimed Confession of Murder and The Villainess in making it full of actions from first person angle. As I said earlier, it was really like we were playing a video game when watching this one. However, this style might be awesome for people like me and my wife who felt it was amazing, but not necessarily for most audience. Sometimes I even felt that the style was a bit repetitive and few of those too obvious CGI effects were a bit of a let down. But in general my wife and I were entertained by the almost nonstop action that drained our energy as it had a very long duration of 2 hours 14 minutes. It has no mid or post end credit scenes at all, and that scene before the end was a bit annoying to us (depending on how you look at it though).

Overall this is a movie that has a high entertainment value if you like the style of action as I said before and you are OK with a bit of repetitive actions and ready for graphic violence (movie was classified for 18+ by Netflix, rightfully so). My wife certainly loved it as heard by how frequent she screamed crazy. But if you do not like such gruesome violence, or prefer good story and conventional type of action sequence, then this is definitely not for you. The choice is yours.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars