Mark Reviews Movies: THE MAN STANDING NEXT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 25, 2020

Park Chung-hee was only the third President of South Korea in 1979, when he was assassinated by the head of Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). For some perspective, the Republic of Korea was established in 1948.

For some more perspective, the country's second president, whom Park essentially overthrew by means of a military coup in 1961 and whose position the third president officially took 1962, was in that position for less than two years. He, too, gained power by way of an uprising, although that one was led by students, challenging the authoritarian rule of the nation's first president, who held power for more than a decade.

The math here is important, not only for the specifics of Park's rule, but also to show that the early decades of the Republic of Korea's existence were politically fraught ones. Park led the government of South Korea for 18 years before he was betrayed and murdered by one of his most-trusted officials, or at least that's one version of the story.

The other version is that the president's killer was acting in the best interest of the country, which had once again fallen into authoritarian rule and was losing legitimacy with democracies around the world, especially the United States. Democracies cannot be run in such a way, because they are, by definition, no longer democracies when one person holds that much control for that long. There was a war on the Korean Peninsula almost 30 years before Park's assassination to challenge the spread of authoritarian rule, and in the fight against that, South Korea fell into its own cycle of one, in essence, dictatorship after another.

Writer/director Woo Min-ho's The Man Standing Next doesn't explain this history, although it really doesn't need to do so. The film follows Park's assassin over the course of the 40 days leading up to the president's killing. Through the political debates and personal/professional squabbles and the constant fear within Park's inner circle, we get a pretty clear and intimate understanding of the relatively early governmental and political histories of South Korea.

It's the sort of environment in which the president legitimately considers using military force against protestors in a populated city. Those who think the idea of tanks running over the protestors is sound are considered loyal. Anyone who thinks such action would look bad—not that it would be inherently evil—is considered a traitor.

That's one of the internal policy debates to which Kim Gyu-pyeong (Lee Byung-hun), a semi-fictional stand-in (The family name remains the same) for the KCIA director who did assassinate South Korea's third president, is privy. Kim disagrees with President Park (Lee Sung-min) on sending soldiers to Busan during protests against his rule, while Gwak Sang-cheon (Lee Hee-joon), who heads up the president's personal security detail, thinks it's only option. In Gwak's mind, communism has killed three million people, so what does it matter if Park's military kills one or two million?

This seemingly unthinkable discussion comes late in the story, which slowly but deliberately establishes and expands the pressure, the paranoia, and the warped politics of existing in Park's government. For a while, the film plays out like a traditional spy thriller, with Kim confronting and negotiating with assorted threats to the president's rule.

One of those is Park Yong-gak (Kwak Do-won), the man who previously held Kim's position, who has traveled to Washington, D.C. to reveal the South Korean President's bribery of members of the U.S. Congress and to publish a memoir documenting his various violations against the human rights of the citizens of South Korea. Another is the U.S. Ambassador (played by Jerry Rector) to Kim's country, who sees President Park's downfall as both an inevitability and a necessity.

Woo's screenplay is clever in the way it uses this more straightforward premise (as well as an introduction that shows Kim preparing to kill the president) as a hook for the deeper and more troubling elements of this story. There's a basic acceptance of the legitimacy of President Park's power in this early section of the film, as if all of Kim's maneuvers and strategies are simply part of the spy craft of any established country. For as much of a problem as Kim's predecessor could be for the president, the apparent solution for South Korea's head spy is talking, compromising, and coming up with some kind of deal that will protect both Parks—the former spy and the president.

At a certain point, though, all of that talk ends, and it does so with four, loaded words from President Park to Kim: "Do as you please." By that moment, we have witnessed over and over again how the president intimidates his higher-ups and plays his officials off each other in such a way that they're all acting to gain his favor, not only for power, but also for self-preservation.

The film illuminates this mindset, as the international diplomacy takes a backseat to internal bickering. Kim and Gwak challenge each other (even pointing pistols at one another in one scene) for the president's attention and affection, and the president's loyalties are elastic, because his one, true loyalty is to maintaining his power.

It all erupts in a sequence of startling violence—a re-creation of the assassination as a bloody and clumsy affair. The final question of The Man Standing Next—one that has persisted in South Korea since 1979—is whether Kim is a hero, acting on behalf of the citizens of his country, or a traitor, killing the president because of a personal and professional grudge. Woo doesn't take a side in regards to the assassin's motives, but in depicting President Park's manipulative and cruel ways, the filmmaker certainly takes a side about the act itself—perhaps necessary but absolutely inevitable.

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