Carter is a bathhouse brawl in search of a screenplay

Carter wakes up in a blood-soaked bed in a Seoul motel room with no name, no past, a cross-shaped scar on the back of his head and a bomb in his mouth. Before he has finished taking stock, CIA agents arrive and demand the whereabouts of a Dr. Jung Byeong-ho, a man he has no memory of. Then a woman’s voice in his ear tells him his name is Carter and that if he wants to live he should do exactly as she says. That is the pitch of Jung Byung-gil’s 2022 Netflix thriller, and it is a good one. It fits in a sentence, and it asks for nothing more than your willingness to run.

The world around the pitch is crowded. A deadly pandemic that began at the DMZ has already devastated the United States and North Korea, and the infected turn violent and zombie-like. The voice belongs to Han Jung-hee (Jeong So-ri), who works for North Korea’s Labor Party, which has teamed up with the South to produce a treatment. Dr. Jung, who cured his own infected daughter Ha-na (Do Yeong-seo), is leading the effort with one of her antibodies. Ha-na vanished on the way to a lab in the North and is presumed to be in CIA hands. Carter’s job is to get her back. The CIA, meanwhile, insists he is a former spy who was thought dead after a mission in Syria. Nobody in this film tells him the same story twice.

The first big test of his abilities comes in a public bathhouse, where nearly a hundred gangsters try to kill him. It is the sequence the film is built around, and Jung Byung-gil knows it. After a fight like that, the rest of the running time has to justify itself against it, and for much of the way it does. Critics who were otherwise unkind to Carter still praised the action and the cinematography, and they were right to. The film moves from motel to bathhouse to van to the road north with very little pause, and the violence has a physical, bruising quality that suits a hero who does not even know why he is so good at it.

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Joo Won carries that burden well. He plays Carter as a man running on instinct, hard-faced and baffled in roughly equal parts, and the amnesia gives him something to act against instead of just something to survive. His body does most of the talking. Jeong So-ri has the odder task of being, for the first stretch, mostly a voice, and she makes it count: Han Jung-hee sounds calm, practical and slightly too certain, which is exactly how you would expect a handler to sound. Lee Sung-jae plays General Kim Jong-hyeok, who greets the arrival of Carter and Ha-na in North Korea and then betrays both Jung-hee and Carter to launch a military coup. He is better when he is quiet than when the plot needs him to be a villain on a schedule. Camilla Belle and Mike Colter bring an English-language CIA presence, and Do Yeong-seo gives Ha-na more fear and stubbornness than the script strictly asks for.

The trouble is the screenplay, co-written by Jung Byung-gil and Jung Byeong-sik. It stacks a pandemic, an amnesiac assassin, a missing child, a CIA operation and a North Korean coup on top of one another and never quite decides which of them matters most. The reveal that Jung-hee is Carter’s wife and that their own daughter, Yoon-hee, is among the infected should land hard. It lands as one more piece of information, because the film has spent so long handing out pieces of information that another one barely registers. Restoring his memory through a device implanted in his head is a tidy mechanical solution to a story that wanted an emotional one.

The infected suffer most from this overstuffing. The premise promises a country under a plague, but the zombie-like patients mostly appear when a fight needs more bodies, and the pandemic works as a reason for the chase more than as a place the characters live in. The coup is similar: it turns the film toward politics for a stretch without leaving anything behind once it is over. Each element would have been enough for a lean thriller. Together they make the film feel assembled rather than written.

What saves it is that the film never pretends to be anything but a machine for momentum. Carter was released by Netflix on August 5, 2022, and the verdict at the time was mixed to negative: admiration for the action, the cinematography and Joo Won, impatience with the story. That split is fair. If you want a plot you can trust, this is the wrong film. If you want an hour and a half of well-built chaos with a lead who can take a beating and keep moving, it delivers a good deal of it, and the best sequences are worth sitting through the muddle for.

So Carter is half a very good action film and half an unfinished thriller. The half that works is loud, fast and confident. The other half keeps asking you to care about secrets it has not earned. Watch it for the bathhouse and for Joo Won, and expect to forget most of the conspiracy by the next morning.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

• Do Yeong-seo — Ha-na

Tags: Netflix, action, Carter, Jeong So-ri, Joo Won, Jung Byung-gil

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