The Roundup: No Way Out: Here He Goes Again

The Roundup movie franchise so far seems to get less plausible and more habit-forming with each new installment. No Way Out, the third entry, has made its hero — Detective Ma Suk Do (Ma Dong-seok) — a cardboard cutout containing infallible intuition and insane physical resillience. He can figure out where the bad guys are going, where they're hiding the drugs, what kind of punch is about to be thrown on the spot, more often than not. And he can be hit in the head by a lead pipe repeatedly and come up swinging. His most fearsome opponents this time around are the Japanese "fixer" Ricky (Munetaka Aoki) and the stylish sociopath Joo Seong-Cheol (Lee Jun-hyuk). Ma's support crew is neither as fierce nor particularly memorable because The Roundup movies are ultimately about a one-man-operation committed to JUSTICE while wearing a tight shirt.

From its opening scene in which Ma takes down a cluster of thugs on the street right on through the final fistfights in which knives aren't merely ineffective but broken with a punch, Lee Sang-yong's entertaining action pic is ultimately a corny vehicle for Ma's undeniable teddy bear charm. I certainly cringe at the notion that people are more likely to confess or cooperate with a cop if met with physical violence but No Way Out is unapologetic about its messed-up politics. Maybe this is what the fascists want: a bulky do-gooder who instinctively knows right from wrong and beats the latter into a pulp then acts like a little boy until the next crime comes up on the police radar.

The Ghost Station: Scratch That

Did you know that "ghost station" is actually a term? I didn't. It refers to a train station that's no longer in use as a stop but still in use for its tracks. So I suppose those stations below stations inhabited by mole people but devoid of trains have a unique term of their own. Anyone know what that is? But I digress. Jeong Yong-ki's The Ghost Station about a subway station where children ghosts are causing the deaths of passengers and conductors is not looking to redefine the horror genre. This film settles for a formula which, frankly isn't a bad thing when done well. And The Ghost Station qualifies.

Na-young (Kim Bo-ra) is a cub reporter whose first viral contribution to the rag where she works misgenders the It Girl of summer, a trans woman with long hair and a longing to litigate. In order to save her job at the rag where she works, Na-young needs a scoop. Her best buddies, two transit workers — played Kim Jae-hyun and Oh Jin-seok — tell her about a spooky recent death where they work. Suddenly, her career is back on track! Her boss (Kim Soo-jin) still hates her but the office is buying her a birthday cake, even though it's not her birthday. That part's easy to explain. What's harder to figure out are the mysterious scratches that are appearing on the back of people's hands and on their necks. By the end, The Ghost Station has made that clear enough for the general readership to understand.

Haunters: Control Issues

When we first meet cursed Cho-in (Gang Dong-won) in Kim Min-suk's Haunters, we're not sure if this abused little boy (Yang Kyung-Mo) is going to end up the hero or the villain of the story. We know that his mother hopes to protect him from his own worst self but his childhood is brutal: physical and verbal violence that can't be hidden by the dirty blindfold he's forced to wear. But from such origin stories, superheroes are made, right? Um... Not this time. As we'll soon find out, once he's grown up, Cho-in will have been warped into pure evil, engaging in petty theft and mass murder, as the situation demands — assisted by his eye-engined superpower: Mind-Control.

His nemesis Im Gyoo-nam (Go-Soo) is, fittingly, quite the opposite. Unable to brainwave people into action; immune to the the time-stopping telepathy of Haunters' hellraiser, he's counting on his upbeat attitude, managerial promotion, and his two best friends — one Turkish (Enes Kaya), one Ghanian (Abu Dod) — to help him fight Cho-in when the latter's enraged. Gyoo-nam's gift for miraculous recoveries will come in handy, granted, but when your opponent can puppetmaster every other living human on earth (except babies), the odds are definitely not in your favor.

Citizen of a Kind: Incoming Call, Outgoing Swindler

Everyone knows you don't give out your social security number or your bank account digits or your password codes over the phone. But old people forget. As do people in dire circumstances — like those with a burned-down house and no substantial savings. Citizen of a Kind's Deuk-hee (Ra Mi-ran) falls into this latter category. A homeless mother with two children and no money for daycare or rent, she's scammed on her cell during a shift at the laundromat where she works (and sleeps illegally at night). When she temporarily loses custody of her kids, she's propelled into action to track down the top of the Ponzi scheme: a menacing sadist (Lee Mu-saeng).

How she manages to get to the bucket-hatted mastervillain involves a number of impulsive actions that had my boyfriend going: Why did they do this? Why don't they do that? To which I could only reply, "It's a movie." I'd further add, it's a pretty entertaining one. Under Park Young-ju's direction, Citizen of a Kind propels its heroine through hard-to-resist comedy and hard-to-watch violence without ever feeling forced or flimsy. Basically a chick flick in which one unlucky laundress gets to solve a crime with three gal pals (the uptight Yeom Hye-ran, goofy Jang Yoon-ju, new kid-on-the-block Ahn Eun-jin), this is one feel-good movie with a get-real message: When the real-world woman upon whom this movie is based caught the head swindler, she got neither the promised reward nor an out-of-court settlement. In life, doing the right thing sometimes has to be payoff enough.

The Childe: The Chase Is on

Coming from the poorest side of town in the Phllippines, streetfighting gambler turned big-time heir Marco (Kang Tae-ju) naturally has no one to turn to once he gets to South Korea. His newly discovered, snarky half-brother (Kim Kang-woo) wants him dead, his long-missing father (Choi Jung-woo) on life support wants him dead, and his conniving little half-sister (Jung Lael) wants him dead — universally for uniquely self-serving reasons. The other new people in his life are a pair of kidnappers — a man (Kim Seon-ho) and a woman (Go Ara) — working independently from each other yet sharing a desire to keep him alive long enough to turn in him (or his body) for millions of dollars. Given The Childe's reality, Marco spends a lot of time on the run. But where to?

The two competing kidnappers may be a better bet since they buy him some time. But which one? One's a femme fatale who hit-and-run him with her car as a form of entrapment; the other's a Cheshire Cat dandy who seems psychotic in his clarity of purpose. Korea's current auteur of adrenaline Park Hoon-jung doesn't give Marco much of a choice. Instead, Marco ends up wherever he ends up as a matter of bad luck and narrow escapes. His ailing mother (Caroline Magbojos) desperately needs an expensive operation but how can Marco secure any inheritance to save her when he's simply trying to survive. Thrilling!