'The Roundup: Punishment' punches above its weight
Korean action star Don Lee returns with another two-fisted crowd-pleaser
It’s not often you hear an audience cheer for a production company logo. But a cheer rippled through the crowd at Madison’s Barrymore Theater on Tuesday night when the logo for Korean action star Don Lee’s production company appeared on screen.
The name of the company? “Big Punch Pictures.”
Which is perfect for Lee. The grizzly-sized actor has had a run of hit action movies in his native country, including the new “The Roundup: Punishment” and seems poised for crossover success in Hollywood.
Lee doesn’t shoot guns, he doesn’t get into car chases. He doesn’t even kick very much.
What he does is punch. A LOT.
With a slightly aggrieved expression on his face, he wades into the fray and delivers a series of roundhouses and haymakers to the bad guys, twisting his body to throw his considerable upper-body strength behind every blow. Each punch sounds like a side of beef getting dropped off a third-floor balcony. Except when he’s personally mad at the punchee. In that case, it sounds like a side of beef getting dropped off a seventh-floor balcony.
“The Roundup: Punishment,” which was a late addition to the Wisconsin Film Festival, delivers more of the same, with two-fisted action punctuated by some wry humor.
Lee returns as Ma Seok-do, AKA the “Monster Cop,” who squares off against an online casino syndicate. If that sounds like kind of a tame assignment for someone dubbed the “Monster Cop,” consider that this syndicate is run by a pair of mercenaries who kidnap programmers (and, in the cold open, execute one of them), and execute hostile (very hostile) takeovers with their rivals with some very sharp knives.
There’s something inherently funny about the decidedly analog Seok-do getting assigned to a cybercrime unit, and the movie has some good laughs poking fun at his ignorance. When told that the bad guys’ gambling site has “open source” code, he responds, “We should get over there before it closes.”
But when he cuts through the digital jargon and finds somebody that needs to be hit, Seok-do is in his element. There are some great action setpieces, including a claustrophobic beatdown in a hotel bathroom and a climactic fight in the first-class section of an airplane. Interspersed are more violent fight scenes where the mercenary Baek (Kim Mu-Yeol) slices and dices armies of victims with the help of CGI blood spurts.
There’s some good laughs when Lee “deputizes” a flamboyant low-level criminal (Park Ji-hwan) to join the task force, and he has delusions of law enforcement grandeur. And despite his penchant for doling out punishment, Seok-do seems like a sweet guy, motivated as much by a promise made to the dead programmer’s mother to catch the bad guys as his own sense of justice.
While Jackie Chan’s “Police Story” movies kept topping themselves (sometimes to their detriment in later installments), the “Roundup” series finds success by staying in the same modest, satisfying register. Lee knows his audience, and that they’ll be happy to come back for more “Punishment.”
“The Roundup: Punishment” is scheduled to open May 3 in theaters.