Continuing on my recent Korean film fascination, A Company Man takes on the apparently universal question of meaning in employment. Must employment provide meaning and value to you as a person beyond the wages you earn? Are you what you do? How does your job define, or not define, who you are? Our protagonist Ji battles these questions throughout. The twist here is that the answers for Ji should be obvious, since his employment is as an assassin working for a private "black-ops" company. When he begins to develop relationship outside the job, and is confronted with some grey-area assignments, Ji begins for perhaps the first time in his life, to think. The resulting juxtaposition of universal questions of meaning and value being asked by someone who is so outrageously outside a universal value code means that we viewers with "regular jobs" must all the more seriously consider the questions for ourselves. This kind of thought provoking story-telling packaging extreme situations with common cultural issues is exactly what I appreciate about quality sci-fi writing and it is fun to see the same methodology in film.
4 stars (out of 5)
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