Carter

3 / 10

An admirable effort for stitching together an enormous amount of dynamic scenes in order to create a continuous sequence shot, but Byung-Gil Jung’s approach is marred by very rough transitions, clear brightness differences and a jagged cinematography when the film-titled protagonist fights a myriad of agents in the Korean streets and beyond. The editing errors though lead to surprising fight choreographies in the first third of the film, resembling Alberto Mielgo’s contributions to the anthology Love, Death & Robots, most noticeably his latest Jibaro. In Carter’s best moments, the camera transforms the action thriller into a 3rd person or even 1st person shooter experience with heavy violence and an authentic feeling of rush, pressure and armored intensity.

But on the other side, the constant flow of action over the course of 130 excruciating minutes makes this action thriller completely monotonous and nauseating. There’s no moment of relaxation and an image stabilizer is dearly missed as the shaky cam taints the actors’ performances. A VFX library is heavily utilized for cheap explosions and the CGI helicopters look bad. There are recalls to Mad Max with extended pursuits in the open field, John Wick-esque combat and The Sadness in the form of a zombie horde, caused once again by a virus, but these impressions get buried under the massive mess of violent fights and drone shots which are turned up to 11. Carter is just too long, overloaded with action and ends in a technical and literally deadening chaos.

Review published on 6th August 2022.