At The Movies: Men on top in The Roundup: No Way Out, Master Gardener

The Roundup: No Way Out (NC16)

105 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: Korean-American action heavyweight Don Lee reprises his signature role of rogue detective Ma Seok-do to again crack skulls, as well as a criminal case of a dangerous party drug, Hiper, circulating around Seoul nightclubs.

Forget about his Gilgamesh stint in Marvel Cinematic Universe outing Eternals (2021), Lee already has a superhero franchise in director Lee Sang-yong’s K-cop Crime City blockbusters that began with The Outlaws (2017).

The threequel The Roundup: No Way Out is set seven years after 2022’s The Roundup.

The time-lapse and Ma’s promotion to the Metropolitan Investigation Unit will presumably be explained over the planned eight-film series, but it is, for now, immaterial as he and his new squad chase down a 20kg stolen shipment of Hiper.

Also in pursuit of the priceless contraband are a Japanese yakuza hitman (Aoki Munetaka) and a dirty officer (Lee Jun-hyuk) cutting deals with the K-mafia and a Chinese consortium.

Ma is a human 18-wheeler with paws that send them all crashing and flying.

The crunchy screwball violence revels in the actor’s outsized physique as much as his charm and world-weary comic delivery. Lee’s star package is what the audiences come for.

But his ridiculous invincibility is becoming one-note.

The Roundup: Punishment is on tap for 2024, and would do well to reintroduce either a compelling villain such as the Chinese loan shark (Yoon Kye-sang) from the first film or the team camaraderie of Ma’s early days at Geumcheon Police Station.

Hot take: The cranky inspector-smashes-bad-guys formula that keeps this entry entertaining is, at the same time, getting old.

Master Gardener (M18)

111 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is the head gardener of a grand estate in the American South. Chaos – followed by violence, this being a Paul Schrader film – enters his tidy sanctuary when he takes in his employer’s grandniece Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice.

Master Gardener caps off American writer-director Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy with Roth now the monastic man at his desk every night, fastidiously filling his diary. His journal entries on the minutiae of botany are read out as inner monologues.

As with Ethan Hawke’s chaplain in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s gambler in The Card Counter (2021), Roth’s devotion to his vocation is a ritual to discipline his inner demons because he has reason to be buttoned-up – and not just emotionally.

He is hiding a body tattooed over with swastikas from his shocking past as a hitman for white supremacists.

An uneasy attraction develops between the rehabilitated extremist and the 20something biracial pupil half his age.

This incurs the jealous wrath of his boss, a wealthy dowager played by Sigourney Weaver, who wants Roth for her own sexual needs.

He is expelled from the Edenic garden, out into the world, where his violent urges resurface in his compulsion to save his young lover from her drug-dealer boyfriend.

Weaver puts on a great show of icy hauteur in a fascinatingly odd story. Schrader’s stern, pressurised crime thriller is concerned with grace, atonement and forgiveness rather than anything so trivial as plausibility.

It is remarkable. Forty-seven years after introducing God’s lonely man in his seminal screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), the veteran American auteur continues to attend to his complex spiritual themes with uncompromising intellectual rigour, even in this relatively minor work.

Hot take: Essential viewing for Schrader completists and horticulturalists – Roth will tell you everything about soil culture.