I’m still relatively new to kdrama having only watched a handful. And this show was reasonably good.
Starting off with the story, the concept was really good. But the execution was extremely poor and this was the only major drawback of the show. It starts off with a stuntman trying to find out the cause of his nephew’s death with the help of a bunch of NIS agents. He is a stuntman but still, the action scenes shown the show are way too exaggerated for a stuntman to pull off, I mean you can’t just write whatever you want in the script and expect the audience to just accept it. Don’t get me wrong, the action scenes were brilliant, just the dynamics behind them were an issue. Now the main issue where the plot holds weak is, how in the world is the stuntman just being allowed to do whatever he wants involving the NIS. Can they just accept the stuntman carrying out his own investigation and do nothing about it? Not just that, they infact start aiding him with the work after he just imposes himself onto them. And here begin the plot devices. There’s a plot device in almost every other scene. I don’t want to name them cuz I’m trying to keep this review as spoilerless as possible. Everything happens in the show too conveniently.
Coming to the characters, another place where the show is lacking. The characters are not well made. And there’s very little to no development in characters throughout the entire show. The protagonist remains the same aggressive thick headed guy who just barges into works done by others on the basis of getting revenge and justice. The female lead’s character must’ve been annoying to many and she was annoying in many places, but this was one of the few characters in whom we see some development in the entire show.
Acting was a positive part of the show. The actors were all decent in their roles. I have read a lot of criticism about Suzy’s performance but I thought she did fine. It’s her only show that I’ve watched so I can not compare her previous works but she was fine in how she acted, probably a little scope for improvement in the seriousness of her role. The main lead in the show was good, and all the other side actors were decent with their performance. I guess nobody was eye catching and awe inspiring but there’s nothing much to criticise either.
Coming to the music, I know it wasn’t the kind of music where we go and listen to it over and over again, but I thought it was certainly music that suited the scenes to perfection. Especially the action and thriller scenes. The songs were fine as well.
Inspite of all this, I’m still giving this show a 7 cuz it is extremely engaging and doesn’t get overloaded(This is the greatest positive in the show). The episodes were not at all monotonous, unlike in memories of Alhambra, where there’s the same style of achronological direction of the episode. Every episode is engaging and the pace is maintained which only dropped towards the later episodes like 14-16. And the show had a decent timing of humour and Other such moments which didn’t seem all too forceful. This made the show the perfect binge material. Coming to the romance, this was fine in the starting half of the show where it didn’t seem forceful at all. But towards the part where the pace slowed down, it gets really awkward and forceful. Another positive that I noticed was that there was not a lot of usage of emotional scenes in the show to manipulate the audience.
Overall I would like to conclude saying that it’s a very good show if you keep your mind switched off regarding the excessive plot devices used. It’s the perfect material to binge over a weekend. Hope this was helpful.