Turtle Stomper
Seattle (USA)
This review may contain spoilers
Don't let the SUPRISE MAN BUN hit you in the ass on the way out
I watched The Devil Judge and I liked the main actor so much I wanted to watch something else he was in, so I picked this drama. At first...if I'm honest...I was pretty put off. They do all this hokey weird crap early on, with like laser beam eyeballs and magically appearing tattoos, to represent the switching personalities. It was pretty cringe, but probably more acceptable in 2015 than in 2021, so I stuck with it. There are also a lot of "love cures mental illness" themes that are a pretty far stretch. As long as you go into it with the view that really it's a fantasy romance drama, and not representative of reality, it's not half bad.
The standout in this drama is for sure the acting. All the leads and even the side characters did a great job portraying their characters. The amount of tears the two main leads shed is insane...like the lead dude for sure needed to recharge his electrolytes to get through scene after scene after scene of him bawling his eyeballs out. IDK if they used fake tears or if little dude really can just cry like that on cue, he definitely pulled the tears out in The Devil Judge as well, so maybe dude is just a good crier. He did really well at giving each personality its own, well, personality. It was almost always super obvious which personality was active, the weird hokey visual clues were probably not necessary. The costume/makeup/hair team did a great job styling each personality to feel like an entirely different person, so when you add in the decent acting on top of that, you almost did feel like you were watching a completely different actor at times.
The story/script was ok. It wasn't great. They spend a lot of time developing certain story arcs that they just drop in the last 10 episodes. There are also some generic inconsistencies...like at one point they show Yo Na running through a crowd with her pink blazer on...but then they cut away to everyone else's view and it's still dude in a suit. So you think...oh, the visual changes are more about how he sees himself than how everyone else sees him. But then they proceed to repeatedly contradict that seemingly clever point by intermixing the two lenses to the point where you're honestly never really sure how dude looks to everyone else vs how he looks to himself. At the end they show Yo Na's blazer on it's own, so then you're like...wait so the blazer crowd scene was or wasn't in his head.... It's like the writers/director couldn't decide what their vision was so just tossed a little bit of everything in and hoped no one would look too closely. It was pretty distracting for me.
There were also a few EXCEPTIONALLY cringey lines from Shin Se Gi early on....like I get he's a personality that's sort of forever stunted in the teenage male angst stage, he perceives everything as dramatic and intense, waiting for his lost love to return. But come on....the initial watch scene was hardcore like walk away level cringe to the degree I felt embarrassed for the actor lol. Some of the costume choices were cringe to the max as well, like the secretary dude having a man-bun at the end, I visibly shuddered.
The music was ok for 2015...though there are some scenes with this wildly mismatched sort of full orchestra elevator music early in the drama. The cinematography was pretty standard for 2015....but man those random weird special effects kept popping up here and there as the drama went on. In the beginning dude had glowy laser eyes every time he changed, with the color of the laser matching the personality that appeared...then they stopped doing it for awhile....then they did it again....then stopped for awhile...dude, it went on like that the whole drama. Zero consistency. At the end, instead of laser eyeballs they'd change the color tone of the shot to indicate a personality was coming out. Like...ok...you've READ the script right, and you have a concept going in, IS HALFWAY THROUGH THE DRAMA REALLY THE RIGHT TIME TO EXPIRIMENT WITH OTHER CONCEPTS??
Overall, it was an ok drama with a sub-par script and very well done acting. I watched it through to the end basically only for the acting. It was a bit of a chore, and I wasn't chomping at the bit to get to the next episode, but I made it through and I don't regret the time I spent. I would never be able to sit through it again, but it was decent enough if there's nothing else you're interested in watching at the moment.
The standout in this drama is for sure the acting. All the leads and even the side characters did a great job portraying their characters. The amount of tears the two main leads shed is insane...like the lead dude for sure needed to recharge his electrolytes to get through scene after scene after scene of him bawling his eyeballs out. IDK if they used fake tears or if little dude really can just cry like that on cue, he definitely pulled the tears out in The Devil Judge as well, so maybe dude is just a good crier. He did really well at giving each personality its own, well, personality. It was almost always super obvious which personality was active, the weird hokey visual clues were probably not necessary. The costume/makeup/hair team did a great job styling each personality to feel like an entirely different person, so when you add in the decent acting on top of that, you almost did feel like you were watching a completely different actor at times.
The story/script was ok. It wasn't great. They spend a lot of time developing certain story arcs that they just drop in the last 10 episodes. There are also some generic inconsistencies...like at one point they show Yo Na running through a crowd with her pink blazer on...but then they cut away to everyone else's view and it's still dude in a suit. So you think...oh, the visual changes are more about how he sees himself than how everyone else sees him. But then they proceed to repeatedly contradict that seemingly clever point by intermixing the two lenses to the point where you're honestly never really sure how dude looks to everyone else vs how he looks to himself. At the end they show Yo Na's blazer on it's own, so then you're like...wait so the blazer crowd scene was or wasn't in his head.... It's like the writers/director couldn't decide what their vision was so just tossed a little bit of everything in and hoped no one would look too closely. It was pretty distracting for me.
There were also a few EXCEPTIONALLY cringey lines from Shin Se Gi early on....like I get he's a personality that's sort of forever stunted in the teenage male angst stage, he perceives everything as dramatic and intense, waiting for his lost love to return. But come on....the initial watch scene was hardcore like walk away level cringe to the degree I felt embarrassed for the actor lol. Some of the costume choices were cringe to the max as well, like the secretary dude having a man-bun at the end, I visibly shuddered.
The music was ok for 2015...though there are some scenes with this wildly mismatched sort of full orchestra elevator music early in the drama. The cinematography was pretty standard for 2015....but man those random weird special effects kept popping up here and there as the drama went on. In the beginning dude had glowy laser eyes every time he changed, with the color of the laser matching the personality that appeared...then they stopped doing it for awhile....then they did it again....then stopped for awhile...dude, it went on like that the whole drama. Zero consistency. At the end, instead of laser eyeballs they'd change the color tone of the shot to indicate a personality was coming out. Like...ok...you've READ the script right, and you have a concept going in, IS HALFWAY THROUGH THE DRAMA REALLY THE RIGHT TIME TO EXPIRIMENT WITH OTHER CONCEPTS??
Overall, it was an ok drama with a sub-par script and very well done acting. I watched it through to the end basically only for the acting. It was a bit of a chore, and I wasn't chomping at the bit to get to the next episode, but I made it through and I don't regret the time I spent. I would never be able to sit through it again, but it was decent enough if there's nothing else you're interested in watching at the moment.
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