Les Interprètes (2016)

What a waste. Waste of solid male n female lead (who not only looks good but has good chemistry). Waste of a plot thay started well and then derail. Waste of my time.
Ep 1 to 20 was just so good. You watch effortlessly seeing the sparks fly between Jia Yang and Qiao Fei. The ingenuous ways he come up to make her life miserable and try to make her quit as trainee in the field of French interpreter. They clash and butt heads but Fei was resilent and refuse to give up her dream.
Then all that mess from the brother being the old flame and has a obessive nature when it comes to Fei. To the second female lead who was a tad pathethic in her love for Jia Ming but then retracted to wanting to be with Jia Yang.. mess and more mess
Then comes the mother who does extreme things like ruining her own son just to break up Jia Yang and Fei. Who does that? And to such extreme. It felt like this drama plot purposefully over inflate itself to generate angst, to fill in episodes? To drag it to pass 40episodes?
I felt like a masochist sticking with this drama to the end. Ep 28 to 36 was so hard to watch. Like 45mins of episode and only 10minutes or less worth watching.
I tell myself i need to see off Jia Yang and Fei's ending so i stuck with it til the ending . but oh boy instead of being awarded with my patience (which really is painful and teeth grinding). The last episode (heads up) isnt satisfying. It was rushed, cramped and jumbled. Didnt flow well and they try to make it dramatic but not believable. Its hard to believe the ending episode is rushed when the last 15or so episodes were so draggy. I still believ the first half that was good was written by another team of writers. If there are the same people then someone must have zap out commonsense from their heads. Like they run out of ideas what to do with the second half of the drama.
If you are wandering to watch or not. I recommend no for several reasons.
The last 1/3 compeltely deviates from the original story of being interpreters
The cliche part of being sick and the high noble road of sparing your loved ones from grief was not written well. Yes alot of dramas commit the same mistake but the way Fei did it just felt wrong. I felt it create needless grief for Jia Yang. Personally i think its selfish when you run away from your loved ones without sharing the truth and deliberately lets him misunderstand you. Her love didnt respect Jia Yang and made that decision for both of them without his knowledge.
Jia Yang's character actually went backwards in terms of growth. Yes it was nice to see him being less demonic and so loving to Fei. But then he became unprofessional when it comes to his work and career. And it was also annoying that he kept saying their love can survive it but i didnt see real actions to solve the problems. Your girlfriend keeps saying there's a big gap between them and that he didnt understand her difficulties.but he carries on as is and with regards to xiao hua and her dad. Although yes his words that their love can withstand it all, there was no action ... It was like him allowing the realtionship to fail eventually.
Jia ming, xiao hua and the guy he married. All characters i dont care for.
Qiao Fei bestfriend was ok but her love line was also not properly developed. Theres too much childish behaviour and they left it too late to the end to show changes.

If you do want to give this a try because the truth is Huang Xuan was really good and engaging as Jia Yang and sparks do fly when he sparrs with Yang Mi's Qiao Fei. Then i recommend you watch the front half of the drama up until he confess and they start dating. The second half will only make you scratch and then bang your head in frustation. So please dont suffer as i did..

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I was really hoping to have a nice review to write for this title, but alas, it's just not going to happen...

Story (6.5/10):
Once the reviews start coming in I'm sure one thing that they'll mostly have in common is how well this drama started. It may not have necessarily been reinventing the drama wheel, but it did stand out. The latter half of the show was when everything went downhill...which is punny and makes me giggle thinking of a particularly awfully choreographed fight scene during the last 10 minutes of the show #spoilernotspoilerIregretNothing!

I thought it was interesting that both of our mains were interpreters which isn't something I've seen in a series before. They also went on location which was refreshing. I also liked this dramas take on the "other guy" (second male lead). In most dramas he seems almost perfect in comparison to the male lead, everything the male lead isn't in the most positive way. The other guy in this story was far from perfect and kind of a d-bag, but I feel it's mainly due to how annoying the "other chick" (second female lead) was. I think it was definitely interesting seeing how the main leads lives were entwined all of their chance encounters. It really felt so sophisticated and well written in the beginning, but then all of the ad naseum of standard dramas began and that made me sad. It makes me wonder if there was a writer change. Things just stopped making sense character wise, especially for such intelligent people.

I also was very dissatisfied with the ending for many reasons though I can unfortunately not share without spoilers. I think some people will disagree with me, but it felt rushed and disingenuous to be honest.


Acting/Cast (6.5/10):
The acting was pretty hit or miss for me. Huang Xuan and Cheng Jia Yang was the best actor by far and probably the only actor who I felt didn't have one bad moment of acting. I haven't seen him in anything else, but I'm certainly looking forward to those dramas now.

Yang Mi as Qiao Fei... This one is a toughy, I don't think she's bad, but I think my dislike was more so for her character which made me a bit biased. It's a bit disappointing since I first saw her in the historical drama "Palace", though I guess that's considered more of a contemporary historical as her characters travels back in time, so it's a great sort of fish out of water story. At any rate, I enjoyed her acting in that, just not so much in this.

Li Xi Rui as Wu Jia Yi - My favorite female character from beginning to end. I loved her expressions and I think her sassy attitude endeared her to me. I'd really love to see Xi Rui in another drama and hopefully as the female lead, so I'll have to check out her details page. Anyhow, she was perfect opposite Zhang Leon! Speaking of which...

Zhang Leon as Wong Xu Dong - He is so friggin' adorable! His character and of course that boyish grin of his, make me fall in love why don't you?! This is my first time see Zhang Leon in a drama, and while I don't think his character allowed for too much in the way of deep acting, I still felt like he added a nice light touch especially for the latter half of the show. I found myself skipping scenes, but not his.

The rest of the cast was just ok for me and I feel like they could've really been filled by just about any decent actor. Not that any I didn't list were terrible by any means, but just didn't stand out to me. Though I may be booed for saying this, but the actor that plays He Zhe totally looks like Asian Butthead, I just can't unsee it...

Music (7.0/10):
I really like the "Mon Cheri" opening song and the soundtrack was really nice and fitting for the show. I think it was probably the nicest and most consistent part of this drama to be honest.

Rewatch Value (1.0/10):
This is not a terrible drama and I don't regret watching it, but I skipped through it too much and there really wasn't anything about it I'd care to see again. Maybe some of the cute scenes between Jia Yi and Xu Dong, but honestly not much else. I would definitely tell others to give it a watch, I just don't think I could sit through it again.

Overall (6.0/10):
Even though I feel this drama started out really strong, it just fell apart halfway through and lost me. While it started off really good, it just wasn't good enough for me to feel it was much more than an average drama which again isn't bad, but I just don't think overall it was great. While it doesn't ruin the entire series, there was some seriously bad acting at times and some things that I felt they were trying to convey seriously and I either rolled my eyes or laughed out loud. It's a real shame that the ending especially felt so rushed and anti-climatic considering how well it started out the gate.

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