Summary
Officer Black Belt lacks any standout elements in its plot, action, or characters, leaving a well-intentioned movie to suffer the terrible fate of being mostly dull.
There’s a problem with Officer Black Belt, a well-intentioned Netflix movie about an athletic idealist punching and kicking recidivism out of South Korean criminals – it’s boring.
Not mind-numbingly boring. It isn’t empty or completely devoid of anything worthwhile. But it’s just fine to a worrying degree. The predictable plot is matched by ho-hum performances and punctuated by so-so action. There’s little to dislike, but nothing to write home about either.
And that can be the worst sort of movie sometimes. What is there to say?
I’ll give Officer Black Belt this, at least – its heart is in the right place. The plot follows Lee Jung-do (Kim Woo-bin), an upbeat martial arts and e-sports enthusiast who, quite by chance, is offered a temporary position keeping track of recently paroled criminals via their ankle bracelets. The more he does it, the more he realizes the need for the position and grows into a sense of moral and social responsibility.
A movie about characters who fundamentally mean well is quite rare. Jung-do wasn’t exactly a layabout before, but his growing refusal to look the other way when a problem presents itself is a satisfying arc. It’s easy to see how the world would benefit from more people who thought like Jung-do, even if it’s equally easy to acknowledge how there isn’t enough of a movie here to make the point as cogently as it could be made.
What surrounds this idea is a cookie-cutter action flick with an admittedly warm relationship at its core between Jung-do and Kim Sun-min (Kim Sung-kyun), the parole officer who offers Jung-do the job after he intervenes in a violent altercation with a supposedly reforming ex-con.
There’s usually a saving grace in movies like this, which is the action, but Officer Black Belt kind of disappoints here too. It’s perfectly okay, but exists in a weird middle-ground where it’s trying to emulate the everything-goes improvisational style of Jackie Chan flicks but occasionally wants to indulge in the hardcore brutality of something like The Raid. It lacks the energy and inventiveness to compete with the former and the stomach to rival the latter.
The fight sequences haven’t been destroyed in the edit, though, which is a small mercy.
But it’s clear that the underlying point of the movie isn’t the fighting, but Jung-do’s motivations for putting himself in the line of fire again and again. There are a couple of scenes of sincerity that do work – one in which Sun-min helps Jung-do talk down a suspect on the verge of suicide, and another in which Jung-do learns about the death of a friend – and make you wish the film was perhaps longer or redone as a limited series to better explore these ideas. I always respect humanity and earnestness in movies, especially genre movies that rarely have the time or inclination for it, but writer-director Jason Kim fails to provide a personal angle from which to examine Jung-do’s development.
I don’t want to be too harsh on what is otherwise an entertaining and efficient movie. There’s just too little to chew on, and not enough you can point at that qualifies as a real stand-out element. You’ll see the ending coming after the first five minutes, and the path to get there is intermittently exciting but ultimately too rote to get properly invested in.
The ending of Officer Black Belt clarifies its underlying themes, so check out my breakdown if you’re not worried about spoilers.
