Four films into any series, you either change or die, and the copaganda finally outruns the action choreography in the fourth installment in The Roundup series. The wild box office success of the series, the most successful action enterprise in the history of the South Korean box office, will survive at least a bit longer, and that’s to the credit of the filmmakers, or perhaps the series’ showrunner and leading man Ma Dong-seok (as Detective Ma Seok-do). This time around, the now dried-up formula of gangbusting reinvigorates faintly with the introduction of limitations to Seok-do’s fists. He can’t punch his way through many of the tech problems and cyber crime that find their way to his Homicide Division as Punishment moves the gangs and crime syndicates fully into the 21st century with their use of open source apps and cloud storage, in addition to tactical knives and handguns.

The changes, unfortunately, don’t make up for the relentless copaganda that gets harder and harder to swallow with every film. Seok-do’s default impulse is a haymaker or a series of alternating hooks; one won’t find dialogue or sympathy in his professional toolkit. When he transgresses the legal process with excessive force to catch the bad guys, unlike Jackie Chan’s character in the Police Story series or Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, he’s rewarded, not reprimanded — or, more often, the various directors in the series play it for a laugh.

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