The Man Standing Next (2020)

This looks like a superb movie, but Impossible to find any stream nowehere!

Fmovies: It wasn't boring for Koreans, the director approached the case with a neutral standard, and this film re-evaluated the character Kim Jae-gyu.

You know when they say that good intentions can go wrong? What if you can't actually tell if they went wrong? Who is to say what right and wrong is anyway? I wouldn't dare say I understood every little bit of history that was presented here (this is one of those cases where it makes sense, at least afterwards) to get into what the movie was about. Yes this is based on real characters and events - and yes it can be confusing to a degree.

Especially because of all the grey areas this covers. And power grabs and jealousy, rivalry and pure horror/fear inside ones mind. To at least a certain degree, things displayed here, would be things you'd attest or expect from North Korea(n goverment), not from the one in South Korea. But when not all is developed yet, when people have to go to the streets to protest for certain things and rights ... well things get and are complicated.

So this is very well made and really amazingly acted. If political thriller/drama is in your "playlist"/something you enjoy watching, this is definitely worth watching. Otherwise you may have issues with it and it's pacing ...

The Man Standing Next fmovies. The assassination itself is worth watching. Lee Byung Hun looks pretty inscrutable for most of the movie. Not a lot of expression. For people unfamiliar with the events leading to the assassination it may be confusing. It seems sympathies of the film are with the main character. Was it jealousy or to spare the country from more dictatorship? Maybe I need to read up more.

Maybe it's partially because I am not familiar with Korean history, but I found the movie rather boring. I was however interested in the background of the events taking place on screen, so I began googling president Park while watching, only to find reading about him and his policies more intriguing than looking at the film.

For those who want to watch it perhaps it's good to know that he was quite a controversial figure. On one hand he is called an evil authoritarian and said to have become horribly corrupt at the end of his reign, but on the other hand even liberals can not deny that he laid much of the groundwork for today's prosperity in Korea.

One thing that kept going over and over in my mind was that this was based on a story that was serialized into 60 parts, in some magazine. And yet, with packing each episode into less than two minutes per, very little happens. Until about the last twenty minutes or so. Okay, so plenty happens, but not enough. This is one of those films that could have lost a few seconds, on average, from each and every shot. It would have made a taut 104 minutes, rather than an often tedious 114.