Three years later, the city is a pile of rubble with post-apocalyptic tribes roaming the parched land. We soon run into Nam-san (Don Lee) and Ji-wan (Lee Jun-young), wasteland hunters: Ji-wan is the goofy, cocky young one, and Nam-San doesn't stray at all from Don Lee's by now familiar beefy, tough-love uncle persona. Not even ten minutes in he's punching someone across a plaza, and later on he punches an intercom so hard he hurts the guy on the other end.
Our protagonists have a good thing going hunting critters in the wilderness and bartering their meat at a nearby establishment. They have a friend in Su-na (Roh Jeong-eui), a young girl who's Ji-wan's crush and Nam-san's surrogate daughter; She's the catalyst for the action when a group of clean-cut strangers invite her over to their high technology enclave; she and her grandmother accept the offer, with Nam-san's blessing. And if you think that everything is on the level... I guess you haven't seen/read/played many post-apocalyptic stories.
Su-na is quickly separated from her grandmother under fake pretenses, and ends up in the one intact building in the city, guarded by military types and ruled over by... the mad scientist from the prologue. Now in normal clothes, but don't worry, he'll find his way back into a blood-spattered lab coat eventually.
Meanwhile Nam-san and Ji-Wan find their way back into the plot when an extremely unlikely and very convenient coincidence has them run into Su-na's grandmother just as she's getting murdered by her escorts. If you squint, you can just about make out scriptwriters Kim Bo-tong and Kwak Jae-min's complete lack of fucks.
Meanwhile Nam-san and Ji-Wan find their way back into the plot when an extremely unlikely and very convenient coincidence has them run into Su-na's grandmother just as she's getting murdered by her escorts. If you squint, you can just about make out scriptwriters Kim Bo-tong and Kwak Jae-min's complete lack of fucks.
The Badland Hunters kill the soldiers - with some difficulty, as the enclave forces seem to be resistant to getting pieces chopped off and being stabbed all the way through with sharp objects; Soon they're joined by another soldier (Ahn Ji-hye) who defected from the enclave when she discovered the mad scientist was squirreling away children to run experiments on. That seems like at least a minor breach of ethics. Oh, and he's the one who turned the soldiers into damage-resistant mutants.
Now a trio, they start making their way to the tower to rescue Su-na, but not before we get an agonizingly boring look at what's going on within the tower.
Now a trio, they start making their way to the tower to rescue Su-na, but not before we get an agonizingly boring look at what's going on within the tower.
The movie painfully goes into a sort of moronic thriller mode for twenty minutes or so as we're shown how the poor people there are manipulated and lied to. It turns out, there's some evil afoot in the place run by grandma-murdering soldiers and a children-murdering mad scientist! Go figure.
It's not a complete loss, however: at one point one of the mutant soldiers eats a mouse in one gulp, lowering it into his mouth in a way that... may seem familiar to people over a certain age. Later on the same soldier gets part of his face ripped off, revealing scales underneath - holy shit, that's got to be some sort of V homage, right? I have no idea, but it did make me laugh. Lizard people, dear readers.
After some faffing about with all this our three ass-kickers get to the building in time for some mildly engaging derring-do, ending things with some fun but very poorly shot action.
Let me just state this as clearly as possible: the script for this movie is an absolute fucking disaster. It's lazy, dumb, full of lazy outs and terrible jokes, and it wastes a huge amount of time with pointless, boring digressions. Yes, it's bad for a knowingly dumb B-movie script. Don Lee makes a couple of his jokes work - the guy's 'can you believe this shit?' schtick remains pretty funny - but the rest is pretty much a waste of time.
Meanwhile, director Heo Myung-haeng, a stuntman who's worked with Lee in the past, comes up with cool stuff for the hand-to-hand fights but isn't able to shoot them in a way that's clear or engaging; Things are comprehensible, just about, but the shoddy editing, shaky filming and poor blocking let most of the action scenes down badly. At least most of the individual moves are clear, so you can appreciate Ji-hye's acrobatic fighting style.
There's also a lot of gunplay, which is fine but it gets a little too repetitive and relies way too much on CGI carnage.
There's also a lot of gunplay, which is fine but it gets a little too repetitive and relies way too much on CGI carnage.
No, it's not a good movie. It does get to be kind of fun, but you need to wade through a lot of shit to some bits which are only slightly better than OK; I wouldn't bother.
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