The Roundup: No Way Out (2023)

Detective Ma Seok-do returns for a third engagement with the criminal element, this time trading his old precinct for the Metropolitan Investigation Unit and a case involving a synthetic drug called Hiper, a corrupt captain, and a Japanese hitman with excellent posture. The film is loosely drawn from a real 2017 and 2018 methamphetamine smuggling operation spanning Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. What the screenwriters have done with that material is strip it of everything except the punching. Ma Dong-seok hits men. The men fall down. The camera admires the falling.

The picture is a genre machine running exactly as designed, and its design has no room for instruction. The cast is Korean and Japanese because the plot concerns Korean police and Japanese gangsters, not because anyone is making a statement about it. There is no romantic subplot to interrogate, no gender politics to untangle, no environmental anxiety to soothe, no arc in which a character learns to accept his own body. The villains traffic narcotics for money, the oldest motive available, and it requires no economic theory to explain. A corrupt police captain is corrupt as an individual, not as a symptom of a system. Nobody here is a metaphor, and nobody is trying to teach us anything.

This is a film about a very large man solving problems with his fists in and around Incheon, and it is entirely content to be that. It ends with the team celebrating, as these films always do, followed by a mid-credits scene that promises another installment. There is no sermon, no scolding, no moment where the audience is invited to examine its own complicity in anything. The film has one job. It does the job. We may not admire the job. We can respect the efficiency.