Badland Hunters (Hwang-ya)

 The first character we meet in Badland Hunters is a mad scientist played by Lee Hee-joon. He's got a blood-splattered lab coat and everyhing!  The police break into his lab before he can inject a young girl with a vial of green liquid (sadly, it's clear and translucent; tut tut), but just at that moment a huge earthquake strikes Seoul, laying waste to the whole city in a garishly artificial scene of total destruction.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

The Roundup: No Way Out

 Well, it only took two sequels for the Crime City series (seemingly renamed to The Roundup in the west, despite the first one lacking that title) to become a parody of itself. This is a problem when the series didn't take itself that seriously from the beginning.

 This time around the threat is a rogue group of Yakuza who've stolen a batch of a deadly new designer drug dubbed Hyper from Japan, and are prepping to put it out on the streets. They're protected by the police chief in Incheon (Lee Joon-hyuk), a silent partner in their drug trade, but things get complicated when headquarters back in Japan realize what's going on and send a small army of thugs led by katana-wielding Rikki (Munetaka Aoki) to kill everyone involved and take back the mechandise.

 Unluckily for all of them, Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong Seok/Don Lee) of the metropolitan police and his team of hangers-on are on the case and working their way up the crime chain.

 I really liked the previous films mostly due to how they balanced gritty cop drama with Ma Seok-do's outsized  comedic persona. He's basically the only adult in a world of eight-year olds, slapping both thugs and the law around until things fall into place, but they worked like eighties cop movies in that respect.

 The Roundup: No Way Out exaggerates that aspect even more and amps up the comedy and action until there's no sense of threat. Don Lee's basically a superhero at this point: infallible, unbreakable and possessed of superhuman strength; His punches now regularly send people flying through walls and at one point he knocks a thug unconscious with an open-handed slap.

 At the same time the plot he's up against is a bit murky and overstuffed with characters. It woks... kinda, but it's nowhere near as compelling as the previous movies' cases. And the pacing is a bit repetitive, falling back on Don Lee arriving, kicking everyone's ass, then finding the clue that will lead to the next throwdown, or cutting to internecine fights between the criminals.

 The action is all right, as always - the choreographies tend toward the basic but it's clear, often funny, and it's full of good stunts. Don Lee's presence helps a lot, his boxer training, bulk and charisma lending credence to his physical threat, and his weary 'can you believe this shit?' expression is always funny.

 The comedy is a bit more unreliable; A new character (Jeon Seok-ho, I think) scores quite a few laughs as a criminal-turned-informant who gets a little too into helping the police, and the few times the movie dares poke fun at Don Lee are pretty funny as well. Less successful: all the bits where the police gleefully roll their eyes at due process and ethics - there's yet another scene where the police cover up the cameras in their (much nicer, this time around) office so they can engage in some police brutality with a suspect, which has become a running gag in these films.

 Later on there's a scene with the Yakuza brutally beating one of their own for information, and I wasn't sure how I was meant to feel - I mean, it played very similar to the police scene before, only people weren't smiling and the music was menacing. I know it's tiresome to bring this up, it's a fantasy where the police are infallible, yadda yadda, but... screw this shit.

 Things have now become untethered enough from reality that the movie loses the sense of danger that the previous installments managed to still hold on to. Either that, or the formula's grown stale for me. It's still watchable - returning director Lee Sang-yong knows how to make slick entertainment - but if I have to be honest, I'm way less interested in seeing where Don Lee and his crew head on next.

The Roundup

 The Roundup chronicles the further adventures of detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok, but I'm going to start calling him by his chosen anglicized moniker of Don Lee) and his merry gang of police brutality enthusiasts, last seen in 2017's very enjoyable The Outlaws. We first get a look at him when he stops a nutjob who's holding a grocery store at knife-point. He gets annoyed at the would-be stabber and actually stabs him lightly in the ass a few times after brutally putting him down. Then, when the newspapers (correctly!) call out undue force, he and his buddies chuckle over the headlines!

 It's... I mean, I think it works within the tone of the movie, which is basically a more comedic, over-the-top Dirty Harry were Clint was a wise-cracking uncle who's not afraid to show some tough love. As with The Outlaws, it operates in a heightened world where torture works, regulations only hinder honest folk who want nothing but to do their job well, and Ma is basically an uncorruptible, infallible engine of justice. I'm ok with it because that's the buy-in to enjoy the film, and I can find it funny. But I'd understand it if others might not... so take this as a trigger warning, there is a lot of  shit in this film that should rightly horrify any right-thinking person.

 With all that out of the way: it's another fun outing for Don Lee and the gang. This time around they're sent out to Viet-Nam to extradite a Korean criminal; Detective Seok Do and his chief (Choi Gwi-hwa) are all set to take it as a holiday, but soon they discover that the real reason why their charge has turned himself in is to escape from a nasty psycho (Son Suk-ku) who's targeting Korean tourists abroad. Of course they decide to go out and investigate, even though it's completely out of their jurisdiction, and from there things get a little more complicated as their quarry angers the wrong millionaire and starts getting hunted down by mercenaries.

 I actually like the structure of the movie a lot - the movie starts with a brutal kidnapping, and the rest of the plot grows out of that organically; it's a good script, even if it often gets a little too ridiculous and kind of loses the plot by the final act.

 Don Lee remains the main attraction here, with a lot of cool dad energy (he even delivers a beatdown with his belt!) and comedic chops. It's a pretty funny film, and a lot of it is based on how inappropriate the shit they pull off is. They even sort of repeat the torture scene from the first movie and kind of turn it into a running gag. Bad Detectives: Port of Call Ho Chi Minh, except that the movie is completely, uncritically on their side.
 Most of the cast returns from The Outlaws; all of the cops and even some of the criminals are given supporting roles. The action is also great, a little upgraded from the first one - not just in that Don Lee now delivers some super-powered punches and knocks out someone with a slap, but the main antagonist gets a very respectable one-take knife/machete/cleaver brawl that starts out like the hallway fight in Oldboy but then spreads out into the surrounding house. Lots of cool stunts, people going through lots of furniture, some good vehicular action.

 All in all I think I liked the first one better, even if this is a better case - some of the stuff here just went a little too broad for my taste, especially how much they get away with over in 'Nam. It's also a clear case of a sequel that delivers more of the same, but louder, bigger, and sillier. That's fine, but let's set some higher goals for the third one.

The Outlaws

  "Based on a true story!" Boasts the trailer for The Outlaws, a 2017 Korean film, exclamation sign and everything. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that, like Cocaine Bear, it uses a real incident (an early 2000's police sting which resulted in a bunch of arrests) as a springboard for a pretty nuts police actioner rather than an attempt to shed any light on what actually happened.
 And this is fine! Because as it turns out it's a fun and well-made pretty nuts police actioner.

 Detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok) heads up a small serious crime unit embedded in the Chinatown section of Seoul, trying to curb Chinese gang violence from escalating. The guy has a personal, almost friendly relationship with most of the gang bosses, to the point where he stops a turf war from exploding by browbeating two opposing gang leaders into playing nice with each other.
 He patronizes another gang den, one of those bars/karaoke joints which... yeah, pretty sure it'd count as a serious case of corruption. He and his team also do that thing where they beat up suspects while pointing the office cameras away. Ah, police brutality, always hilarious.

 It works, though, because the movie adopts a pretty heightened tone that doesn't fully break with reality, but it's made abundantly clear that it's not one-hundred percent serious either. They do this mostly by deploying Ma Dong-seok's outsized charisma and impeccable comedic timing; The guy is ridiculously likeable, and can do no wrong even when he fucks up. There's quite a lot of understated humor in the movie, and most of it comes down to Dong-Seok's considerable charm. He's just as likely to treat an armed assailant as a child and annoyedly ask for the weapon, rather than getting into a fight... and the funniest part is that it seems like common sense, yep, that would probably work. At least for Don Lee.

 The main plot arrives in the shape of a trio of mainland goons led by one Jang Chen (ex-K-pop singer Yoon Kye-sang, in good badass form). They come to collect on a debt, and instead take over one of the gangs and start to brutally murder their way across the criminal underworld. They're so ruthless that it actually works! But their methods call too much public attention, and cause the police commissioner to take the case away from the Serious Crimes unit.

 Ma Seok-do takes exception to this, and manages to keep the case for ten more days by betting his job on being able to make 25 arrests before that time is through. Again: not how the world works, but it's a snug fit with the somewhat goofy, ultra-tough tone of the film.

 There's some cheesy business with a surrogate son figure (though he might be his real son, if I understood correctly? That would make it a lot cheesier) and some brutal, actually upsetting violence - torture, sexual violence, that sort of thing. As with much of South Korea's cinematic output, the tone can vary wildly from one scene to the next, but overall it's pretty well considered. There's some bloody detail to some of the carnage but nothing too gory.
 The action is pretty great. There's a lot of it, mostly short and brutal, not show-offy at all. It still manages some fun sequences, my favorite ones involving cars. The standout is the one drawn-out fight set in a public restroom, and it's an absolute winner: no porcelain is cracked, but you can't say the same for mirrors, glass partitions, a flowerpot (!) and some pipes. Great stuff.

 It was hugely successful and has already spawned two wildly popular sequels, with a third one on the way for next year. Based on how enjoyable this one is, I'm really looking forward to catching up with the further adventures of Det. Ma Seok-do and the gang.