The Roundup: Punishment (Heo Myeong-haeng, 2024)
The man with the cinder block fists is back, and this time he’s learning what the internet is. For the last three years, Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) has been making sequels to his hit 2017 film The Outlaws, in which he plays a large cop working his way through gangs of criminals with nothing but the sheer audacity of his punches to defend him. The fourth film in the series, Punishment, continues his tour through East Asian criminality (following the first movie’s Chinese villains, the second’s useless Vietnamese cops, and the third’s Japanese yakuza), this time opening in the Philippines, where a group of bad guys has set up an online gambling operation, kidnapping coders and killing the competition. Detective Ma and his team come across a murdered Korean programmer and resolve to smash the organization, though that will involve having to explain to Ma what exactly “syncing to the cloud” means.
Like all the Roundup films, Punishment is set in the past: the first one took place in 2004, this latest in 2018, and it’s ostensibly based on a real-life case. As the films move along into the present, they’ve become gradually less xenophobic and racist, and slightly less invested in justifying police brutality, possibly tracing the arc of acceptable public attitudes over these issues over the course of the early 21st century. The Filipinos here play only a small role, though they are notedly eager to rip off the Koreans they come across. Similarly, the Philippines itself exist not so much as a place but as a site where unsavory Koreans (as in in the last two films, all the real villains are local, even if their crimes involve foreign nations and nationals) can violate laws with impunity. There’s also only a brief moment of police brutality, really just a callback to earlier films, as opposed to the big comic scenes of the other entries in the series. Rather than his traditional strategy of just beating the name of a superior out of his suspects only to proceed up the chain to beat the next name out of the next suspect, Ma here relies on his team, especially some new members who know how to use computers, to engage in some actual investigating and trap-laying for the crooks this time. It’s too early to say that Detective Ma has gone woke, but he appears to be heading in that direction (and with Ma's apparent plan to make another four Roundup films, we may see him reach social enlightenment before too long).
But really, this is all tangential to what these movies are really about, and that is the joyous sight that is Ma Dong-seok punching dudes in the face. We’ve got a new director this time around, with Heo Myung-haeng replacing Lee Sang-yong, but he sticks to the formula: clear coherent lines of action that emphasize Ma’s bulk and choreography in which the villains flit around his stolid presence, only to get blown up by one of his punches. The primary villain this time is played by Kim Moo-yul, an actor who started in musical theatre, the ideal training for a Ma counterpart: his dancing background contrasts perfectly with Ma’s MMA wrestling and punching power-based moves. As in previous films, the villains knives stab quickly, but Ma’s bulk wins out in the end. Even if he gets himself stabbed through the fist, Ma Dong-seok is inevitable.
Back are various members of the supporting casts of previous films, mostly anonymous fellow cops and a couple of outlandish petty crooks-turned-informants. But it doesn’t really matter who any of them are, they just exist to bounce (sometimes literally) off of Ma. The Roundup films, despite maintaining a basic continuity, are not serials. They don’t have overarching plots and Detective Ma is not an anti-hero with a dark past, a secret quest for revenge, or any backstory or life outside his job at all. He’s a personality with giant fists who, for slightly less than two hours once a year, captures our attention and then moves on to the next case. The closest analogue in American media right now is Jack Reacher, a surprisingly smart (if not tech-savvy) brawler who is simply very good at his job, especially when his job involves smacking bad guys around. One of the problems with Reacher’s second season was that it gave the character a backstory and a group of friends to avenge, trying to graft modern storytelling psychology onto an essentially mythic figure. Here’s hoping Ma Dong-seok never falls into that trap, that we never learn he has a dead wife or an alienated son. All we want is to watch the big guy work.