Lee Byung-hun brings a useful seriousness to men behaving badly. Hollywood has sometimes given him too little character to play; we prefer the awkward, funny desperation that Park Chan-wook draws out of him in No Other Choice.
Fi1m perspective
In No Other Choice (2025), Lee Byung-hun plays a man who has lost his job and assumes that eliminating the other applicants is a problem he can solve through preparation. His Man-su has spent his life being competent, and Lee does not rush to make him ridiculous. He takes the planning seriously enough for the incompetence to hurt. We laughed at the first botched attempt because Lee makes it feel like a professional embarrassment to a man who has chosen to commit murder.
That part makes good use of an actor often cast as enforcers, assassins and other men expected to be effective with violence. His breakthrough came with Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area (2000), followed by leading roles in Korean cinema through the decade. A Bittersweet Life (2005) and I Saw the Devil (2010) belong to that development, with Kim Jee-woon becoming a recurring collaborator. The turn to black comedy gives that familiar intensity something different to do.
The move into Hollywood began with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), and sometimes left him playing action types with little dialogue or character development. We would rather see his physical commitment put into a more substantial part. Playing the Front Man in Squid Game (2021) widened his international recognition, though our admiration for that programme rests chiefly on the players and their desperation.
Park gets such good work from him by refusing to let Man-su become merely a comic incompetent. Lee Sung-min makes a rival's unemployment matter as much as Man-su's, while Son Ye-jin gives Mi-ri her own practical concerns. Lee's desperation remains understandable in their company, but it stops being an excuse. His seriousness keeps the comedy from becoming a plea to find Man-su endearing.
There are limits to what the performance can fix. No Other Choice runs long and repeats jokes whose point Lee has already made; another demonstration of Man-su's inadequacy does not tell us much more about him. We would welcome more roles that let him be this inept without losing his dignity altogether. Start here for the comedy, with patience for the repetition.
Biography
Lee Byung-hun is a South Korean actor. He began his career in 1991 after a KBS talent audition and graduated from Hanyang University with a degree in French literature and from Chung-Ang University with a degree in theatre and cinematography.
He has appeared in South Korean films including Joint Security Area (2000), A Bittersweet Life (2005), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), I Saw the Devil (2010), Inside Men (2015) and The Man Standing Next (2020). His Hollywood roles include Storm Shadow in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), as well as appearances in RED 2 (2013), Terminator Genisys (2015) and The Magnificent Seven (2016).
Lee is known for playing the Front Man / Hwang In-ho in the Netflix series Squid Game (2021–2025) and Man-su in the film No Other Choice (2025), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.
