Badland Hunters — Heo Myeong-haeng

Ma Dong-seok does it again in Netflix’s Badland Hunters. Like most of his notable roles post-Train to Busan (2016), he plays a haymaking Byronic hero with a pained past, this time around as the star of the very loose sequel to last year’s Concrete Utopia. The post-apocalyptic landscape following the nation-state destroying earthquake of the first film, supplemented with the undead and rogue alligators, lends itself to a character like Ma’s Nam-san. After all, the star persona the actor has built is essentially that of, well, a badass hunter of the badlands.

Like the genre flip between Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves, also courtesy Netflix, this second film has little to do with the first. The former at least share characters; the only carryover from Um Tae-hwa’s Concrete Utopia is the apartment complex that survived “the end of the world,” as the characters observe in Badland Hunters. Three years later, a few communities have gathered in vieux jeu slums and survive off the scraps of 21st-century Seoul. Nam-san’s community lives near the former bus district, and his role is indeed very much that of a hunter in this post-modernity hunter-gatherer civilization. We’re first introduced to him when his business partner Choi Ji-wan (Lee Jun-young) braces for his death before an alligator attack. (Yep, you read that right.) The gator slides out of the frame as Nam-san pulls its tail and swings it with the ease of a child with a stick. (It’s a shame this won’t play widely in U.S. theaters because this is the kind of character introduction that would earn an eruption in a group setting.) This scene also captures a bit of what American action blockbusters have lost: the ability to will its performers to industry stardom.

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