Badland Hunters (2024)

Badland Hunters arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing for it. Seoul has been flattened by an earthquake, the survivors scavenge across a dust-colored wasteland, and Don Lee hits people until the credits roll. The plot concerns a mad doctor harvesting teenagers for an immortality serum so he can resurrect his dead daughter, the sort of premise a more self-important production would dress in moral anguish. This one dresses it in fists.

The cultural ledger here is remarkably thin, and that is description, not complaint. The cast is entirely Korean because the story is Korean, a fact that requires no editorializing from anyone involved. An Ji-hye, as the special forces sergeant Eun-ho, performs nearly all of her own stunts and trades blows with the male leads on equal footing, though the film never pauses to make a point of it. A villain hoards supplies and experiments on the vulnerable, but he is a mad scientist, not a thesis about wealth. The apocalypse is seismic, not climatic, and nobody lectures about the environment between beatings. The film has no interest in the body, the mind, the past, or the economy as subjects for instruction.

The rest is craft. The fight choreography is brutal and legible, the pacing is relentless, and the whole enterprise understands that a B-movie lives or dies on momentum. It is a standalone sequel to Concrete Utopia, sharing a producer and a premise but little else, and it topped the Netflix charts worldwide within a day, which tells us what audiences wanted from their January. A film with no sermon in its heart and no lesson in its mouth. For those of us who spend our days cataloguing the ideological freight of popular cinema, this is a thin vintage. For everyone else, it is two hours of a very large man solving problems with his hands.