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.