Badland Hunters

Dramatically, Badland Hunters never raises above the level of a streaming pilot. Director Heo Myeong-haeng's film presents itself as a sort of orphan project that introduces a few too many characters then doesn't really make a tremendous amount of effort to wring their post-apocalyptic wants dry. Anyway, there's an apartment complex, the only one still standing in a city otherwise reduced to rubble; a mad scientist who runs the building, attracting dilatory survivors with promises of clean water and cushy condominiums; and a standing garrison of reptilian grunts who cannot wait to charge at incoming gunfire. Of course, none of that dressing matters when you have the swaggering brawn of Ma Dong-seok to hand. Indeed the pained attempts at character investment that clog up the film's first hour melt away the instant that Nam, Ma's wasteland butcher, finds his way to this concrete experiment camp and starts hurling haymakers. Previously the best thing in Train to Busan and The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (not to mention, thoroughly wasted in Marvel's excretable Eternals), Ma is a sensational action proposition: the guy is enormous; a sardonic strong-man able to weave and strike like a heavyweight boxer. Director Heo (whose previous credits include martial arts co-ordinator on Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird) cues up several corridors filled with human garbage just begging to be mulched by Nam's fists, pump-action shotgun and the saw-toothed machete that hangs (just out of reach) across his enormous shoulders. Heo isn't a one-trick pony either, tailoring several sprier, but no less exhilarating, action encounters around Ahn Ji-hye's Lee Eun-ho, a knife-happy ex-special forces sergeant with a high rise-sized grudge.