I could not MAKE myself like the FL – despite having certain "strengths" (damn good in a fist fight, good at interrogation – so long as she can use illegal tactics, successful prosecutor working on her wits – but merrily taking bribes), she is crude, insensitive, corrupt and I can't particularly see how she is supposed to be 'elite'. Even though she is beautiful, I started to even find her face annoying because she used a lot of overly animated expressions – but repeated the same ones all the time. Frankly she was a bit of a slapstick character for me. And unfunny. She has friends who have been nothing but loyal, but – without being abusive – she mostly just uses them, including her colleague and old college pal and her 'uncles' from her dad's old gang.
ML was engaging enough, but a bit dull. We know he is here (from the states) to try to clear up his doubts about his father's death, and that he has some business nouse (and money), but we don't really get to see much personality. In fact perhaps that's the crux of this drama's weakness for me: if a character can't be played really broad almost like a panto character, they seem to be very bland. It's too much focussed on the FL who is herself rather one-dimensional. Even though we get her backstory and motivation, there's not much to her character except self-interest and a pretty hefty dose of selfishness as well.
The writing is full of cliches and thus pretty poor. Poor-but-driven (and deeply smug) prosecutor, conglomerate exile back-to-make-good, toxic family and in-laws, thug gangs running round in crap clothes beating people up with big sticks, underlings either passively allowing or actively supporting wrongdoing, Hanju using underlings' family to keep them in line, police routinely arresting no one or the wrong one, and either making no investigation or total incompetence, corrupt officials openly accepting bribes and doing no work in the pay of the super rich. Also too many apparent debacles for the 'good guys' later revealed as actually strategies they have set up so that the 'triumph' is overturned ... but even after that the Hanju group drop another bombshell, etc etc etc.
I managed to finish this, but the ending was a bit odd. The FL, at first feisty, has to modify her feisty half way through in order to seem to conform a bit, but at around that point (which is also when she and ML start to get closer) the plot gets a little odd, with lots of what I can only call filler because it doesn't move things forward very much. And it's a bit boring. Eventually everything comes more or less right, but the decision of ML to go back to the states, and the FL to follow him leaves me a bit flat. And the final scene of the whole shebang quite frankly confused my last brain cell quite a lot. But also I didn't really care by that point.
By half way through I had to use the Netflix speedup button to take me through this – still, that is a better result than having to abandon it outright.
Most of the cast acted very competently, with some tried and trusted familiar faces doing sterling work. Sadly I was disappointed with the FL though I suspect she was doing what she could with the material and the direction
Sadly, for me, only a 6.5 out f 10