November 2023: Destiny

 

Some demonic Xmas trees for you this season

I'm deep in Korea travel planning but here are some interesting shows from November. 

Destined with You 

In Destined With You, Rowoon plays a rude, standoffish lawyer, Jang Shin-yu, who is haunted by a hand covered in blood. Totes normal. In a new job at city hall, he encounters and immediately dislikes civil servant, Lee Hong-jo (Jo Bo-ah).  Meanwhile, Hong-jo has a crush on Kwon Jae-kyung (Ha Jun) another lawyer who works at city hall. Jae-kyung rejects her confession which sets the stage for her casting a love spell which maybe accidentally gets delivered to Shin-yu. Shin-yu feels constantly drawn to Hong-jo but neither of them are sure if these feelings are real or the spell. But he manages a drunken confession of his own which is swoonworthy. Layered into this is another plot that involves the past lives of Shin-yu and Hong-jo. Why is this such a popular trope lately (See You in My 19th Life, Heartbeat)? 

The is-it-a-spell-or-not of this story made it hard to fall for the couple at first because they did not even want to fall for each other.  It would have been stalker-esque had the man even wanted to be there in the first place. So it just set a strange tone from the start. Then the mystical elements of casting spells, past lives, and that bloody hand sort of came and went jarringly. The very real evil around them (another "whoops there's a murderer in this romance" and a truly atrocious fiancée) was hard enough to fight. 

But the actors kept me in it. Buried somewhere in here is a message about the major sacrifices one makes for love. But I'm wondering if that message could have had better packaging.  

The Worst of Evil 

Ji Chang-wook is back in an action-drama. While the gangland storytelling might be familiar in framing, it was a great showcase for his talents. Since he's been doing a lot of bad dramas, it was a relief to finally see him in something that suited him. Amen. 

This very Donnie Brascoe-esque K-drama is set in the 1990s--you know because there are pagers. Park Jun-mo (Ji Chang-wook) is a police officer married to another officer, Yoo Eui-jeong (Im Se-mi). She is a member of an elite police squad and her whole family is full of cops. Jun-mo is always trying to prove himself worthy to her and her family. So he takes a risky undercover job to help him land a big promotion. He agrees to go undercover to join a drug gang led by Jung Gi-cheul (Wi Ha-joon). Gi-cheul just happens to also be his wife's first love. When he is caught by the gangsters meeting up with Eui-jeong, she ends up joining the assignment to try to help, and pretends to be divorced and interested in Gi-cheul. As Jun-mo gets deeper into the drug organization, gaining Gi-cheul's trust, so does his wife. Meanwhile, Jun-mo is paired with a Korean-Chinese drug leader (Bibi) who he is meant to take care of. 

This is a very classic gangster tale. The gangster wants out of this life but he has to just do one more big score. The organization is held together through deep ties of loyalty, but he trusts the wrong man who then weakens those bonds. At the same time, he finds those around him are not as loyal as he thought they were. 

Jun-mo and Gi-cheul are not wildly different from each other. Their lives could have gone in either direction. But as Jun-mo spends more and more time with the gangsters the lines around him blur and who he is becomes fuzzy. Worse, this is happening in front of his wife who cannot help but see that he has changed (or has this always been a part of him). 

Ji-Chang-wook excels at tender-hearted characters who express themself best through action and violence over words. So the role is a perfect fit. Wi Ha-joon too suits this upstanding drug dealer who wants a better, clean life. Bibi is haunting as a woman fighting to be taken seriously in this business and who ends up trusting Jun-mo more than she should. 

Paranoia, misplaced loyalty, corrupt cops, Catholicism, and extreme violence make this an atmospheric show. They smoke so many cigarettes you feel like you can smell them. While it may not be an original story, it had some valid twists and turns and it was a relief to finally be able to see JCW back in action. 

Dali & the Cocky Prince

Not sure why I finished this one. 

Kim Dali (Park Gyu-young) is a polished chaebol who works in the art world in Switzerland. Through a case of mistaken identity, she encounters a boorish restauranter Jin Moo-hak (Kim Min-jae) who she finds curious and funny. They lose track of each other and then find each other again back in Korea once Dali takes over the museum her late father was running. She discovers the museum owes a large financial debt to Moo-hak.  

The fundamental problem with this show was that Dali is just so dull and uninteresting once she comes back to Korea. She was quirky in Switzerland but once she has to buckle down to run the family business all her personality evaporates. Worse, she's inept in all ways with running the business and her backbone is intermittent. It’s just boring to watch. She’s also helpless in ways that feel unreasonable for someone of her age, class, and connections. It's no fun to watch her be constantly fooled by men and their machinations. 

Meanwhile, Moo-hak has the more interesting story. His pure survival focus on money shifts when he meets Dali and he starts to slightly understand that there is more to life than money. There was the potential here to dig into class issues in Korea and the show attempts to. But it's all quite hacky. 

I like Kim Min-jae but he's done better shows. This one is not worth the time.