The Legendary Tycoon (2017)

The Legendary Tycoon is a loosly based adaption of the life of legendary Hong Kong film mogul, Run Run Shaw. When I say loosely based adaption, however, I am very serious. Honestly speaking, the only true to his life facts in this drama are the family background and the time spent building up the film company in Singapore. Everything else, from the character names down to the characters themselves, are fictional. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, it worked well in the beginning. The issues started after the first one third of the drama, though.

My biggest problem with this drama started with the introduction of the charactets of Kong Lin Jie and Xaio Yu. From that point on, the story changed from a history of how the brothers established a movie company from nothing into a messy love triangle between Gu Yan Mei (the character bassed on Run Run Shaw), his fictional life long rival Lin Jie, and his simpering yet manipulative second love Xaio Yu. I had a huge dislike of Xaio Yu. None of it comes from the fact that because of the Hallayu ban in China, Ku Hye Sun was replaced with a Chinese actress. I would have intensely disliked the character no matter who played her. She was written awfully and I could not fathom why those two male characters would love her so much. I could go on and on about that, but I won't. I will just leave it at the character being awful and unlikable.

One other problem I had with it is the editing. I don't really even mean the obvious CGI edited in actress switch to scenes, either. I mean the editing of the whole drama in general. It really gets choppy in the final third. Characters are suddenly written out, things happen without explanation, new characters show up without back story. The characters you came to be attached to in the beginning are no longer there. It is hard to invest in the new characters. To top it all off, the last few episodes feel really weird. I won't spoil it, but I will say that new characters show up and things happen that do not make sense. It is only for overdramatic purposes.

Finally, my last complaint is that characters became inconsistent. Their personalities, motives and behaviors changed in order to force dramatic events in the plot. I hate it when drama writers do this! It is a major peeve of mine.

In the end, I can say again that The Legendary Tycoon started off really well and had a lot of potential but it lost itself along the way and became a chore to complete.

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