Carter

Carter (2022)

Runtime: 132 of the longest minutes in my life

Directed by: Byung-Gil Jung

Starring: Random Korean actors I didn't know... and Camilla Belle! I kid you not.

From: Netflix

This will be the first of two reviews I'll post today. In a few hours is one that I should have posted a few days ago. W/ that out of the way... the movie I saw last night is a reason why I rarely subscribe to Netflix.

In the battle of action movies released on streaming services this past Friday, Prey eclipsed Carter in every way... views, popularity, and presumably quality. I didn't even like the director's last movie (The Villainess) yet someone on a messageboard mentioned they saw it and implied they wanted others to do so. As no one else did... but even I was taken aback by how bad this was. This was absolutely dreadful.

There won't be a recap of the “plot” as everything was sacrificed for the sake of action—which was the biggest issue as they couldn't get their key objective right-I'll explain why in a moment. The story is utterly confused nonsense which I'm sure makes zero sense—a Korean dude known as Carter wakes up with no memory and via a microphone implanted in his head he has to rescue a young girl tied to a virus and a pandemic... yeah, by this point “virus” and “pandemic” has become tiresome in modern movies. Further machinations on the story presented here really isn't necessary. Sorry for the spoiler, but nothing is resolved by the end!

For something full of action you'd hope that it was all done well, such as in The Raid; regrettably you don't get that here. Instead, it's improbable action scenes that are just stupid and aren't charming like the insanity we got in RRR. The biggest sin of all was that it was filmed in the worst way possible. The camera CONSTANTLY moves around which only caused nausea and a headache for me rather than enhance what probably were poorly done action scenes that always featured terrible-looking CG. I mean, the action beats were literally a blur.

Compounding a problem was that for some reason, the entire film has a one-shot gimmick; 1917 this ain't. Instead, there are seemingly 100 cuts that are barely masked or hidden which made the gimmick absolutely pointless; I mean, why bother? If you're too dumb or too lazy enough to do it right, why was it even attempted? It's all a stupid waste of time—when I'm begging for the normalcy, logic & steady camera work of the Crank movies and Hardcore Henry, something went horribly awry here.

Honestly, this wasted my time which is what has me upset the most. There are enough people on Letterboxd who will virulently disagree with me here but about all that it did for me was write off this director for good & make me determined to watch better movies while I have Netflix-I'll be careful with that, especially with their original films.