Round 4
Ma Dong-seok and his fists of fury return for more bruising in the still-expanding The Roundup franchise.
The Roundup: Punishment
Director: Heo Myeong-haeng • Writer: Oh Sang-ho
Starring: Ma Dong-seok, Kim Moo-yul, Park Ji-hwan, Lee Dong-hwi
South Korea • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong May 1 • IIB
Grade: B
Korean actor-pugilist Ma Dong-seok (Don Lee to some) is kind of like Jesse Plemons. These guys have little, if any, of the qualities we expect from our movie stars, and yet Plemons (who almost stole Civil War from his wife) demands boatloads of respect and Ma is a massive star (in every sense of the word) with one of the most successful franchises in the world currently on the go. Did any of Vin Diesel’s Fast & Furious movies premiere at Berlin? Nuh-uh. Don’t think so. The Roundup: Punishment | 범죄도시4 did. Boom!
The fourth entry in the ridiculously entertaining series of slugfests is much like the other three: Ma Dong-seok’s beefy, intrepid detective Ma Seok-do applies his oh so au courant illegal search-and seizure and excessive force antics to a group of foreign nationals operating organised crime rings in Korea. Incoming director Heo Myeong-haeng (Badland Hunters on Netflix, also starring Ma) stays the course with lots of punching and lots of Ma-style charm. Punishment isn’t quite the revelation the first two films were – crime-thriller The Outlaws and comedy-thriller The Roundup – but fans will be sated. Ma’s mighty mitts land in wildly creative and crunching ways this time around.
The boys are back
Truthfully, what is there to say? Punishment starts in the Philippines (the tour of Asia’s criminal underworlds marches on), with the brutal murder of a young Korean tech nerd. He’s an app developer who caught the eye of Chang Dong-cheol (Lee Dong-hwi, Broker), another IT genius who’s running an illegal online casino. Back in Seoul, we catch up with Ma and his loyal crew – partners Kim Man-jae (Kim Min-jae, Cobweb), Yang Jong-soo (Lee Ji-hoon) and the put-upon captain Jang Tae-soo (Lee Beom-soo) – taking on a drug ring, which involves Ma literally ripping a cage door off its hinges for a raid. Hey, it’s what we’re here for.
Before long, Ma has promised the dead man’s mother he’ll find his killer and get hers some justice, a decision that puts him and his team in Chang’s orbit. There’s more to Chang than the casino of course: he’s into money-laundering and crypto schemes, and he has a psychotic hired gun, Baek Chang-ki (Kim Moo-yul, Ballerina, Space Sweepers), taking out witnesses to Chang’s shenanigans. The digital angle brings cybercrimes cop Han Ji-soo (Lee Joo-bin) and Gang Nam-su from digital forensics into the mix, and then there’s punching.
Long story short, The Roundup: Punishment is starting to follow the pattern all long-running franchises do: it’s getting repetitive, usurping genre conventions isn’t as amusing or surprising as it once was, and it pulls a page from the mainland China school of action/thriller filmmaking with its epilogue noting a real-life raid on a similar casino. Even still, going into one of these and not expecting exactly what it is is akin to going into a butcher shop and finding it full of meat. Plus Heo and writer Oh Sang-ho reinsert the comedy that was painfully absent from The Roundup: No Way Out, which is welcome. This has some genuinely funny moments, particularly when Ma actively trolls his favourite reluctant police informant, Jang Yi-soo (Park Ji-hwan, with a 4-star mullet) – you can see Ma the actor having a great time – and boggles at his phone’s functions. “Who has time to enter all those phone numbers?” he deadpans when asked why he doesn’t buy a new phone and sync his contacts. Punishment also ups the violence quotient considerably, with more than a few, uhh, punishing fists to guts and heads, peaking in a first class airplane cabin in a throwdown for the ages. Make no mistake: this is a Ma movie all over. He’s still the antithesis of every cop in every Korean movie… ever, and even if his movies get a bit tired, he never does. — DEK