(Contains spoilers)
A lot happens in Badland Hunters that appears to be a spiritual sequel of Korea’s Oscar entry, Concrete Utopia. Seoul is in tatters, three years after a catastrophic seismic event. People have become savages, resorting to consuming snakes and crocodiles. Doctor Yang Gi-su (Lee Hee-joon), who is introduced in the first scene, has survived the earthquake and is now working towards something ever so menacing. He has resources, food and water, and the loyalty of a corrupt military. Nam-san, a brutal animal hunter, played by the typically charming Don Lee, travels cross-country to rescue a young girl in the doctor’s possession. He is accompanied by the youngsters Choi and Suna.
Doctor Yang’s magisterial medical establishment, where his doctrine of ‘nurture the young’ by experimenting on them, is where push comes to shove. Choi and Suna are looking for a friend, but are also tantalising targets for a military, corrupted by greed and self-interest. The three protagonists finally arrive at the compound, kick some high-on-steroids military behind and rescue not just their friend but a whole bunch of young men and women being trained by the demonic doctor. Staring defeat, Yang injects himself with the deadly serum and tries escaping his own lab with a suitcase in hand. When confronted, it is revealed that Yang’s intentions were never as noble and valedictorian as suggested. In the suitcase, there is the torso of Yang’s own daughter whom he had experimented on and evidently lost in the process. This was never about welfare but about self-preservation.
Badland Hunters is a thrilling mix of dystopian fiction, dizzying action set pieces and some good old Don Lee shenanigans. Here are some features that make the film an entertaining racket:
1. Don Lee, the action powerhouse
For someone as bulky and unsentimental in his performances, Don Lee, makes for a unique Asian superstar. What makes him so likeable is his ability to play his age and his buxom body type. In one scene, when ambushed in an alley, he tries to reach for a sword he has slung along his backside. For a few seconds, he can’t reach it, in what is a hilariously choreographed act of self-deprecation. Especially for a star who kicks butt so effortlessly, it’s delightful to watch him have to sweat for it. It’s the kind of dad energy that Lee has mastered in this late stage of his career.
2. K-drama’s recent obsession with spurious medical experimentation
Whether it is the theoretical ambivalence around the pandemic or the general state of the world, but K-dramas have of late obsessed about the intent of medical science. Netflix’s Gyeongseong Creature, for example, harked back to the World War era of dubious human experimentation.
Badland Hunters, in comparison, suggests that welfare might just be the product of abundance. In a world where provisions are scarce, resources limited, medical science may well evolve to function like a weaponised myth. It’s eerie and unsettling to even comprehend.
3. Jaw-dropping action sequences
Close combat inside cramped, narrow corridors is a K-drama trope that the world has begun, to mixed effect, imitate. Most action films coming out of the Korean storytelling factory themselves seem stuck in that time loop of close-contact friction and bloodletting.
Badland Hunters, though it follows much of the same spiel, adds some welcome zing to the sequences with bullets and brutality. This sort of action isn’t for everyone, but when Lee rolls back his shoulders and lets go of that thing called hesitance, the ultra-violent pay-out is exciting to say the least.
Safe to say, heads leave torsos so brutally, you might squirm as much as you might also enjoy it. So much so, even this early in the year, Badland Hunters might have the most frenetic, bloody and satisfying set-piece set inside a closed space.
4. A fascinating reading of dystopia
While most dystopian films serve common fare like an urgent battle for survival, Badland Hunters takes place well into the future of a catastrophe. It implies that new habits have been adopted, characteristics compromised, and fresh embankments of culture and lifestyle spawned.
From mercenary groups to bizarrely dressed hippies, though the film hints at these cultural fallouts, it retains as its central focus the cornucopia of hope, radiating from an unreliable source.
Food and water are still elusive possessions, but in an increasingly infertile land, the young represent that promise of life. “The young are our future,” Dr Yang declares repeatedly as he convinces parents to relinquish guardianship of their own children. It’s almost a metaphor for indoctrination, our misaligned trust in institutions that claim to educate and groom. Enlightenment may well be self-attained, but education can be tailored, manipulated and forcibly injected.
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