No Mercy for the Rude: Turn Your Gaydar on the Tight-Lipped Killer

No Mercy for the Rude secretly wants to be a gay movie. Take a look at its protagonist (Shin Ha-kyun). He's a fashion-conscious assassin who wears leather underwear and whose best friend (Kim Min-jun) used to dance ballet. And if he's not gay then why's this mute, murdering poet always fighting off the advances of that horny nightclub singer (Yun Ji-hye)? Why's the only way he can have a son to find a stray boy on the street? He's also suspiciously over-concerned about the length of his... tongue. (This last part is supposedly the cause of his lisp!) And isn't it more than a little weird that he's consulted the local urologist about his speech impediment? Do straight guys associate the mouth with the penis? I don't think so. Then what's going on here?! The way he kills men isn't gay. That's for sure. But he does hold his victims in a tight embrace while stabbing them. Probably writer-director Park Cheol-hie was just too scared to make an outright queer movie. He's subconsciously piling on homoerotic tidbits left and right but in the end, No Mercy for the Rude keeps its hero straight. Someone should get Park a date with a man. That way his next screenplay's hero won't have an inability to say "I love you."