Gushing Thoughts on The Outlaw (2017) and The Round-Up (2022)
I don’t know what kind of action movies you like, but I’m into the kind in which heads split open and limbs fly and I tell myself I wanna meet the action choreographer AND the make-up person.
Even better if they don’t use too many guns cos, like Leon the Professional said, pros do it with knives.
In both these movies, the bad guys are TOTALLY SCARY bad-asses who wield axes and machetes like they were real hungry and there’s a tough piece of steak in front of them.
But the bigger and badder bad-ass is Detective Ma (played by Don Lee who has an MMA background and was also one of the Eternals, wow) who uses his enemies bodies as punching bags and whose fists deliver KOs’ like Domino’s delivers pizza.
The two movies juxtapose extreme and bloody violence with (almost) slapstick comedy; the ‘interaction’ among Detective Ma’s team and the captain is practically Korean Police Academy material (and if you don’t know what Police Academy is, don’t worry that just means you’re way younger than me).
I gotta say no matter how many times you see it, it’s still uncanny to watch very silly jokes and dialogue play out both before and after scenes in which the antagonist chops off the limbs of a hostage or just somebody he doesn’t like. Extreme comedy and extreme violence are an awkward couple.
As far as Hollywood offerings go, I’m sure there are many similar movies but I can only think of (for now) the Lethal Weapon films which, however and alas, don’t have a near-invulnerable hero-cop smashing the living daylights out of the bad guys.
Anyway, The Outlaws (2017) is based on a true story in which Seoul cops take down some crazy-vicious Chinese-Korean gangsters whose MO is dismembering rival gang members. This is also the first time the world was introduced to the humour, pugnaciousness and brutality of Detective Ma who has no compunction about smashing the heads of bad guys in.
The Round-up (2022) practically continues where the first movie ends, this time with Ma and his team investigating the brutal murders of Korean tourists in Vietnam. Again (and delightfully), arms and legs and buttocks are sliced up, lifts and gambling dens have Pollock-like blood splattered all over their walls, and the sound-effects crew has to be commended was adding that extra oomph to Ma’s punches.
I was like, who needs Thor when you have this King Kong of a dude saving the world?
