"Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island"

Min (played byKim Myeong-min) is an ace detective who's presumably some sort of scientific genius even though most of the time it looks like he's just making everything up as he goes along. Seo-pil (played byOh Dal-soo) is Min's bumbling sidekick, who never actually seems to have any idea what's happening. Together they have wacky adventures. That is, until they meet Hisako (played byLee Yeon-hee), at which point "Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" turns into a competition by the make-up team to see how many convincing juvenile corpses they can dress up in time for the screening.

That's right, some jerk had the bright idea to introduce child slavery and torture into a wacky adventure involving those guys from"Detective K". Is it really so much to ask, just for an action comedy that doesn't feel the need to raise the stakes by introducing lots of corpses? It's not even internally coherent here. The final scene is a zinger for a potential sequel that's about as far off from serious as possible. Chances are halfway through that movie we'll end up seeing mangled diseased fleshbags ravaged by blood-borne transmissions.

Anyway, back to the present. "Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" is tolerable, for awhile, just as a dumb low effort comedy. Min is a bit of a jerk, Seo-pil never has a clue what's going on. Hisako is an attractive woman. No, seriously, that's the full extent of her involvement in the story- just as the occasional object to set up a pervert joke. Hisako could easily be written out of the movie without changing anything. She's little more than a glorified extra until the halfway point.

I hopeLee Yeon-heedidn't pin any serious hopes on this movie raising her profile, because it's not happening. Besides, "Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" is mostly just an excuse forKim Myeong-minandOh Dal-sooto show off their bro chemistry. It's good chemistry, and as long as you don't think too hard about the quality of jokes, for awhile it's easy to laugh at their wacky antics.

But every joke eventually weighs out its welcome, and right when the child corpses show up, that's when I finally lost patience. I'm for a good couple hours of escapism as much as anyone. The trouble is, child corpses really spoil the mood. Would the hang-gliding sequence have been more funny if the situation wasn't already way too depressing? Eh, maybe. I did just realize, though, the lost island...isn't really lost. Aside from being the hideout of the bad guys, there wouldn't even be anything noteworthy about it.

The same can be said regarding the movie overall. It's just a large number of mostly random scenes with no real point. It's practically a running gag that Min's investigative techniques make almost no sense, and he seems to stumble from one stage of the mystery to the next at random. Alas, "Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" lacks any serious self-awareness that it is, itself, a dumb, bloated movie, so don't go into this one expecting to laugh on principles of simple absurdity. In the end, the joke's going to be on you for wasting time on "Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" in the first place.

Review by William Schwartz

"Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island" is directed byKim Seok-yoonand featuresKim Myeong-min,Oh Dal-sooandLee Yeon-hee.