You
know Ma Seok-do must be a tough cop, because he is played by Ma Dong-seok (Don
Lee). Ma has ten days to clean out every last member of the Chinese gang from
the Garibong-dong neighborhood. Naturally, he will not have any help from the
Chinese authorities and precious little from his own Korean police bureaucracy,
but he can handle the task anyway with his crushing face-palm. It is time for Ma
to take out the trash in Kang Yun-sung’s The
Outlaws (trailer
here),
which screened during the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Ma
is not a superman—he has bad knees. Criminals are better off running when they
see him, rather trying to go toe-to-toe. In the past, he has informally
maintained a truce between the local gangs of Seoul’s Chinatown district, but
that went out the window when the savage Black Dragons arrived.
Jang
Chen doesn’t respect anything except raw power. He came from Harbin to collect debts
for his gang and decided to stay to build an empire. Reluctantly, many henchmen
from the Venom Gang defected to his syndicate for reasons of self-preservation,
but the only people Jang treats with any respect are his two psycho lieutenants.
Of course, the merchants and residents of Garibong get the worst of it. Ma will
have to convince them to stand with his ragtag unit if he has any chance of
rounding up the Black Dragons before the case is kicked upstairs to the pompous
homicide squad.
Ma
Dong-seok beats the snot out of Black Dragons. Seriously, what more do you need
to know? There is actually a fair amount of inter-gang rivalry and intrigue,
but the film is really about Ma putting his foot in their butts. Frankly, the
film is a little slow out of the blocks, but Kang uses that time to establish
his many characters and the cowed and depressed atmosphere of Garibong-dong. Of
course, when Ma hits the streets, the film is all business.
After
Train to Busan broke Ma/Lee out in
Korea and internationally, The Outlaws and
Champion have solidified his status
as a crossover action star. In both films, he shows he has the size, chops, and
the amiableness to be something like the next vintage Schwarzenegger. Watching
him swagger inspires endless confidence in a film. While Ma’s Ma is the
drinking buddy you always wanted, Yoon Kye-sang makes Jang Chen one seriously
cold-blooded villain. He is the sort of ruthless sociopath the audience will
yearn to see crash and burn. Yet, Park Ji-hwan and Jin Seon-kyu manage to
periodically upstage him as his chief rival and first lieutenant, each of whom
is dangerously erratic.
