‘The Roundup: Punishment’: Berlin Review

Dir: Heo Myeong-haeng. South Korea. 2024. 109mins

Followers of the primary three movies within the Korean motion comedy Roundup sequence – The Outlaws (2017), The Roundup (2022) and The Roundup: No Method Out (2023) – will know  what to anticipate from this fourth instalment. And whereas The Roundup: Punishment might not win over new audiences, it’s unlikely to disappoint its fanbase: it’s a robustly entertaining romp starring Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee), reprising the position of “Beast Cop” Detective Ma Seok-du and clobbering some justice right into a number of snivelling wrongdoers together with his piledriver fists.

Pacy, slick and unapologetically formulaic

The plot, unfolding in each Seoul and the Philippines, includes an unlawful on-line playing organisation and the homicide of a South Korean tech child in extravagantly violent circumstances. However as at all times, the true level of the image, which has offered to a number of territories together with the US and UK forward of its Berlin premiere, is to function a car for Lee’s outsized charisma. 

Though that is solely the second directorial outing for former stunt and battle choreographer Heo Myeong-haeng, he’s a long-term collaborator with Lee, having labored as a battle choreographer on Practice To Busan, and a martial arts choreographer on the earlier three Roundup footage. (His directorial debut, dystopian sci-fi motion image Badland Hunters, additionally starred Lee.) Not surprisingly, the battle sequences are the place the movie absolutely involves life. So far as the sequence’ trademark mix of motion and comedy goes, Heo appears extra comfy with the previous than the latter. Pacy, slick and unapologetically formulaic, The Roundup: Punishment might not match the reception of the earlier footage however, just like the inimitable Detective Ma, it will get the job accomplished in its personal distinctive and environment friendly method.

Lee could also be greatest recognized to some Western audiences for his uncharacteristically muted efficiency as Gilgamesh in Chloe Zhao’s The Eternals however, since his breakout efficiency in Practice To Busan, it’s Korean cinema that absolutely utilises the actor’s distinctive attraction. Glowering, unreconstructed and boarish, Lee’s display screen persona as Detective Ma appears to include equal components scowling and punching.

If something, there may be much more scowling right here as a result of, as one colleague ventures, Ma “isn’t actually the tech savvy sort”. The detective who can barely work his cellphone will not be an apparent match for a cyber crimes investigation – or certainly for something that can’t be slapped into submission. Luckily, there may be additionally loads of gang-based knife violence and homicide, which is an space of crime investigation that Detective Ma is aware of his manner round.

A key a part of the attraction of this sequence is the truth that the road between the great man and the dangerous guys is blurred to the purpose that it ispractically non-existent. So a scene by which Ma exhibits one thing approaching decency comes as an virtually unwelcome shock. Luckily, that is quickly adopted by a terrific sequence by which Ma extorts funding for an advert hoc expense account for the investigation by menacing a few low-life gangsters.

The true villains of the piece, in the meantime, embody slippery tech-bro Chang (Lee Joo-bin), a flamboyantly dressed dandy with a viper’s smile and a cabinet full of cash, and his ruthless enforcer Baek (Kim Moo-yul), a worthy opponent for Ma within the movie’s most visceral and gory battle sequence.