No Other Choice Fails to Capture the Downsides of Downsizing

There’s no better time than now for an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s unsparing 1997 novel The Ax, an acutely observed book about downsizing as a form of dehumanization. The bad news is that No Other Choice, the Ax adaptation Korean master Park Chan-wook has been waiting years to make, isn’t the picture Westlake’s cold, glittering shiv of a novel deserves. We know that movies and books are distinct creatures, and the pleasures we find in reading are never going to be identical to those we get from the screen.