Carter (2022)

Upon waking up without memory, a man is tasked with a nearly impossible mission.

Unrealistic and unwatchable! From start to finish, the same unrealistic things repetitively happen unwatchably. Carter is constantly running around, fighting hordes of people (more unscratched than Steven Seagal) in an attempt to achieve something befitting for the era just gone, namely the pandemic. Writer/director Jung Byung-gil tried to reproduce his previous film’s success, The Villainess (2017) (unfortunately, I didn’t praise that either), combining it with what writer/director Ilya Naishuller did with Hardcore Henry (2015) and Nobody (2021). Unfortunately, again, the outcome is neither.

Carter is a film that thousands of people have worked hard to bring to life, so I won’t be too harsh about it. This type of action film is not reinventing the wheel: The Raid (2011), The Raid 2 (2014), Headshot (2016), and The Night Comes For Us (2018), to name but a few, are films with modest budgets and impressive results. The know-how is there. Byung-gil should have stuck with what works and added his own personality to it rather than trying to create something ‘new’ that is unbearable to watch. Arguably, his philosophy was: ‘I shoot it this way, and all the mistakes can be fixed in post.’ While mistakes are indeed fixed in postproduction, that is not the role of editing whatsoever! The editing stitches the pieces together in a way that the narrative calls for. The way Carter was shot intended to create the illusion of one continuous shot and irreparably damaged the hard work of those thousands of people in front and behind the camera. They say that the editing either makes or breaks a film. It has most certainly torn it apart, in this case.

P.S. If you want to see how jump cuts and radical editing are truly effective (in a time when it was innovative), watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).

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Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!

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