A simple man helps a martial arts officer apprehend a man who has broken his probation. After that, he becomes a martial arts officer, responsible for ensuring that the ankle bracelet men follow the rules—otherwise, he’ll come for them.
Officer Black Belt is a typical South Korean action-comedy crime movie. It is reminiscent of early 2000s South Korean movies when genre mixing often felt chaotic.
The main issue with this movie is that the protagonist and his friends are portrayed as goofy characters. The people he’s tasked with handling—those who have violated their probation—are mostly dangerous perverts who shouldn’t even be allowed to breathe.
The movie’s main characters, however, are warm and likable, except for the primary villain, a monstrous and depraved man who never should have been born. This also goes for the guy who attacks a member of the protagonist’s family. After that attack, the movie takes a darker turn, and you know someone is bound to get hurt or even killed.
When the main villain tricks the protagonist and two of his colleagues into a trap, the movie becomes genuinely suspenseful. The energy skyrockets as his two colleagues fight for their lives. This is the best scene in the movie because it’s so dramatic and exhausting, and the two colleagues are in serious danger.
What really got to me was the nature of the main villain and the fact that they even let him out of prison. This sick man is a predator who preys on children, and it doesn’t take long before he makes a deal with another criminal to kidnap a little girl and make a disgusting film.
Just stop it! If you’re making an action-comedy crime movie, you don’t cross that line. It’s way too dark for a movie like this, and there’s something seriously wrong when South Korean filmmakers come up with ideas like this for a character who’s a child predator. It’s unbelievable that someone can be so stupid writing a screenplay like this!
The fight scenes try to create energy and drama, but aside from the battle with the two colleagues, the protagonist’s fights are mediocre, except for one scene. They drag on too long, though the best fight of his is when he faces off with the villain for the first time. There’s real tension because something is genuinely at stake, and while the choreography didn’t impress me, I was hooked emotionally. I feared the outcome, especially since the movie had just shown a highly dramatic fight scene with the protagonist’s colleagues right before his fight against the sick villain.
I’ve seen a lot of movies like Officer Black Belt, particularly South Korean movies from the early 2000s, which often crossed the line in terms of appropriateness. They tend to push things too far once the good guy has had enough of the bad guys, especially after they harm someone close to him or her.