[HanCinema's Film Review] "Officer Black Belt"

Jeong-do (played by Kim Woo-bin) is a fairly chill guy living his best life. He works deliveries at his dad's fried chicken restaurant, hangs out with his friends, and does martial arts in his spare time. Jeong-do does everything he does fairly competently, he just doesn't have ambition to do much more. That changes when he meets Seon-min (played by Kim Sung-kyun), who recruits Jeong-do to work as a probation officer.

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At first glance, probation officer in training isn't really a very strong film premise. And at second glance it...still isn't much of a film premise. The whole concept is very episodic. As in, literally, it's very easy to segment "Officer Black Belt" into six distinct arcs. There's one arc for each prisoner on probate that Jeong-do deals with, and two such arcs for the final villain, who we can tell is a bigger deal than the four who came before him because he has a more intimidating physique.

Until this guy shows up there's little indication that Jeong-do's job is anywhere near as difficult as the script implies. No individual prisoner on release is all that tough. Strangely, Jeong-do only really fights maybe half of them. "Officer Black Belt" tries to acknowledge the humanity of prisoners on probate by showing some of them as merely being emotional, or pathetic, with crime just being a sad fact of their lives about which they feel regret or shame.

While it's a nice sentiment, it's hopelessly undermined by the fact that the majority of the convicted criminals we see are exactly as violent and cruel as the stereotypes would have us believe. One of them even tries to rape a woman despite Jeong-do literally being right outside his door. Jeong-do using the taser on this guy is supposed to be cathartic, but I bristled a bit, remembering the rather unsettling way "The 8 Show" demonstrated that tasers really aren't as fun as they look.

"Officer Black Belt" does well with its fairly charismatic lead actors. Kim Woo-bin is almost impressively harmless in his role as a decent, nice guy who's just not particularly motivated to do anything because his dad and his friends are the only people in his life who really need him. The friends also have a very good bro vibe going for them. Far from being buffoonish, they're also reasonably intelligent in their own right and listen to Jeong-do when he warns them not to be out and about when Jeong-do is hunting down the bad guys.

While Kim Joo-hwan has decent direction in that regard, his script just isn't that impressive. It was hard not to roll my eyes by the reference to Seon-min having a kid at home, as if the set-up for the rest of the movie wasn't already very obvious even without that particular background detail. Preliminary Netflix data suggests that "Officer Black Belt" might actually do decently well worldwide, which tracks, since it is technically well-done, even if the plot is at best uninteresting and at worst problematic.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Officer Black Belt" is directed by Kim Joo-hwan, and features Kim Woo-bin, Kim Sung-kyun, Lee Hae-young-I, Kim Ji-young, Kang Hyung-suk, Kim Yo-han-I. Release date in Korea: 2024/09/13.