Lee Sang-yong’s The Roundup has a shorter runtime in comparison to Kang Yoon-sung’s 2017 predecessor, The Outlaws. I’m fascinated by this in terms of its characteristics for success, and the momentum handed to it in course of its fruition as a franchise nowadays with a total of four movies in its deck. The same goes for its third chapter, Lee’s The Roundup: No Way Out, which opened in Cannes and in South Korea last summer.
Whatever the case is or may be, there’s no question that Lee capitalizes on just about everything that worked in the 2022 sequel. That film’s writer Kim Min-sung, as well as its Cha Woo-jin, paired up to pen The Roundup: No Way Out, for a story that beefs things up plenty in the action department without losing a beat in the energy that keeps it going. Par for the course is frontman Don Lee, centerstage once again as the hulking and charismatic Ma Seok-do, as introduced in The Outlaws for the ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a peacekeeping detective and head of the major crimes unit in the Garibong district of South Korea’s Chinatown.
In The Outlaws, Seok-do took down a murderous Chinese-Korean gangster. In The Roundup, our hero stumbled upon the trail of bodies stretching from Vietnam to Korea and hunted down the killer responsible forthwith. Between both of those films, Seok-do has accrued plenty of field time handing his share of measurable beatdowns of numerous henchmen in the process. That far from changes in The Roundup: No Way Out, which transplants the unflappable protagonist seven years later as the head of the Metropolitian Investigation Unit. His latest charge? A homicide that envelopes Seok-do in an investigation involving the manufacture and distribution of a new drug that involves the Chinese Triads and the Yakuzas, and a mystery middle man playing both sides of the law. When members of Metro are attacked after an investigation, it’s up to Seok-do to play the hand he’s been dealt, follow his intuition accordingly to get answers. Invariably, that also means having to punch his way through as many (and I mean many) goons as he has to.
The big rub of this affair is what happens when a crucial drug deal is jeopardized under said middle man, drug dealer Sung-cheol (Lee Joon-hyuk). The Yakuza gets wind overseas when a batch of drugs go missing, forcing their hand and assigning a sword-wielding fixer named Riki (Munetaka Aoki) to make the wrong things right. Meanwhile, as Seok-do grows ever closer to solving the case, the plot thickens when he learns of the death of a police captain investigating the same case. This only speeds up Seok-do’s race against time in a narrow chance to get his man before his window of opportunity closes.
The consistency in tone and pacing are still there compared to the previous film. Nonetheless, the discernible action and comedy in The Roundup: No Way Out is a standout presence in a film that goes straightforward into the meat and potatoes of what makes these films fun to watch. Don Lee’s Seok-do commands the room when he enters the scene, as is the pure glee of watching plebian thugs try aggressively to hold their own against the lawman, only to fail utterly and haplessly.
This sort of trope carries well in a lot of action films of its kind, and what makes it work is its ability to keep the trope fresh without exasperating audiences. Seok-do is still a person who acknowledges occupational hazards that come with his line of work. It helps that the level of villainy is so high among the film’s antagonists that you can’t help but root for Seok-do, so when you see him get hit by a car or take bats to the head only to get knocked out, there are still stakes to look out for.
Action directors Heo Myeong-haeng and Yoon Seong-min are the shepherds of the fight scenery here. The two make fantastic use of their star’s decades of pre-acting career boxing experience well, even incorporating this aspect into the characterization of Seok-do whose skillset in knocking people out is just as ridiculous as the criminals who try to go toe-to-toe with him, broken ribs be damned.
The drama is especially fun with Don Lee in the company of co-stars like returning actor Kim Min-Jae, and actors Lee Beom-soo and Ko Kyu-pil to bounce off. Lee also extends this to Japanese counterpart Aoki, best known among Otakus for his screen excellence in the Rurouni Kenshin franchise and appeared most recently in Godzilla Minus One, in a fight scene that also pays homage to the first film in which Seok-do jocularly tells his perp to put his weapon in his bite-sized evidence bag without making a fuss. One scene also sees Seok-do introducing his “lawyer” to his main perp, which itself is a total riot.
The action also enlists South Korean MMA pro Hong Joon-Young who also threw down in hit Netflix series, “Bloodhounds,” as well as actor Lee Joon-hyuk in his latest screen credit with the lead actor since Kim Yong-hwa’s 2018 sequel, Along With the Gods: The Last 49 Days.
Clocking in at about the same runtime as the previous film, you can guarantee that the 4K UHD and Blu-Ray/DVD being offered by Capelight Pictures for release in the U.S. is well worth the asking price for The Roundup: No Way Out. If straightforward and crackling action comedies are your speed, buy this movie, add it to your collection, and save some space for The Roundup: Punishment while you’re at it.
This review was written for the April 9 release of The Roundup: No Way Out on Blu-Ray. The movie is presented in 2.39:1 aspect ratio, with DTS-HD 5.1 audio in Korean language and English dub, and optional English subtitles. It also contains chapter selections, and trailers for other Capelight releases, including The Roundup, Ashfall, and Hard Hit.
