My Cultural Diet

After watching Unstoppable, I wanted to experience some more Ma Dong-seok (billed here as Don Lee), and since The Roundup had pretty decent marks on Amazon Prime Video — which features quite a few of his movies — I thought I’d give it a shot. This time around, Dong-seok plays Ma Seok-do, an infamous detective who’s not afraid to knock some heads — and violate some civil liberties — if that’s what it takes to catch the bad guys. (In this case, a violent expat living in Vietnam who preys on Korean tourists.) The Roundup has the sort of brutal brawling you look for in a Ma Dong-seok/Don Lee film, but the wanton and casual police brutality quickly wears thin, as do the hijinks and bumbling of Ma’s colleagues and fellow officers. And unfortunately, neither Ma Dong-seok’s charisma nor the film’s style is enough to salvage it. Given The Roundup’s massive success, though — it’s one of the highest-grossing Korean films of all time and has spawned two sequels to date — I’m clearly in the minority.

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