Trigger (2025)

Trigger: Strong Start, Weak Finish

Trigger starts strong with good acting especially the first few episodes. Woo Ji Hyun shines as a student showing why ordinary characters are given those guns—highlighting their personal struggles and moral dilemmas. This setup makes you care about their choices.

The gang internal struggle later ruins it, shifting to pointless violence and losing focus on ordinary people’s motives.

A plus is how the series exposes gun sellers profiting from chaos.

The ending feels unrealistic and unsatisfying, lacking depth or buildup.

I would have preferred a deeper look on how guns would affect the society, through government measures similar to COVID-19’s lockdowns, mask mandates and fear-driven policies, panic buying of essentials .

Exploring more of governments imposed strict controls. This approach might have better reflected the ripple effects of gun violence on both personal lives and public behaviour.

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Good action scenes cannot make up for lackluster story and characterization

Before I'll elaborate any further on this drama, keep in mind that this is NOT a spoiler free review. Proceed with caution. Also, I want to apologize in advance for my poor English, it's not my first language so I'm sorry if I repeat myself or if my opinion is not clear. Feel free to ask any questions.

I got introduced to Kim Nam-Gil in Through The Darkness, which became one of my most favourite kdramas, while I first saw Kim Young-Kwang in Evilive (which I haven't finished but I'll watch it again). Both of them were great in their series so when I learned that they would be the main leads to a new thriller, you can imagine my excitement.

I LOVE thrillers. Give me a good and gripping plot with well-written characters and my money is yours. The premise of Trigger, albeit common and not that groundbreaking, caught my interest immediately. As someone who loves in a gun-free country (Greece), I cannot even fathom what would happen if people got handed guns like sweets. I was very curious to see how the series would explore this matter and based on what I had heard, I expected an intense action-packed thriller, with psychological and philosophical aspects.

Alas, I soon realized that I should had lowered my expectations.

First of all, the plot as a whole was A MESS. We have the main story between the main leads, Lee Do and Moon Baek and then other subplots that are connected to the whole gun flood. Which is totally logical. They needed to show different people who chose to "pull the trigger" under different circumstances. A mentally unstable student, a man charged with sexual assault, a wronged mother, a bullied kid, gangsters...But the problem is that due to the changes regarding the settings and the characters, the pacing became inconsistent. One moment, your attention would be focused on these characters and then the story would shift to that character, then another etc.

At one point, all of that felt pointless. The most unnecessary subplot was definitely the one regarding the gangsters, who found themselves tied to the organization that provided the guns. Too much screen time was wasted on them when they could have used for more efficient parts of the story or better character development. Because of the many different stories and characters, most of the mini arcs fell rather flat and the characters' emotions and struggles were explored in a superficial way.

The best subplots were the one with the mother (Oh Kyeong-Suk) who sought justice for her dead son, the bullied kid (Park Gyu-jin) who wanted to defend himself against his bullies and Lee Do's chief (Cho Hyun-Sik) who wanted to avenge his daughter who had committed suicide because of scammers. I actually cared about these people and I caught myself thinking about how emotions and difficult circumstances can influence our judgement.

The action scenes were one of the better parts of the series. The fighting sequences were intense and fun to watch, watching Lee Do and Moon Baek fighting and shooting was really entertaining and I had a blast. On episode 6 (one of the best by the way), the school shooting part had me at the edge of my seat. I was so anxious to see what would happen.

But good action scenes cannot make up for a lackluster story. Yes, it was cool seeing Lee Do soloing all of these criminals and thugs but I wanted something more. I wanted more exploration regarding people's psychology and despair which leads them to violence. I wanted to see more of the ethical aspects regarding guns and their use for self-defense and justice. At the drama, Lee Do got suspended for killing the sexual offender, even though he did it in order to defend other police officers. And yet we never saw how that affected the public's opinion. It would be a great opportunity to see the common mind being divided into two categories, the ones defending his action because he is a police officer and he had to kill a criminal and the others who would see that as an act of power. But that never happened.

Another aspect that was flat was the characterisation. The main leads were obviously the characters we spent more time with and yet even them were underutilized. And I say that as someone who overall enjoyed watching them (either as a duo or separately). Both actors did a great job at portraying them, Kim Nam-Gil conveyed Lee Do's softness yet ruthless character while Kim Young-Kwang killed it with Moon Baek. The acting saved the characters for me because the writing, on the other hand, was disappointing.

Lee Do was pretty complex. As a child, he saw his family getting killed and later, he had the chance to kill the murderer by pulling the trigger of a gun. But Cho Hyun-Sik stopped him. That event played a tool on his character and shaped his own ideology. When he served in the military as a sniper, the weight of the people he had killed haunted him and he joined the police as a detective to help the public without having to use a gun (I'm not going to comment on that). But in the drama he had to use a gun to take another life (the sex offender's) in order to save another one. His actions came in contrast to his believes but the series barely touched his inner conflict and it didn't explore his trauma that much. At the end, Moon Baek called him out for that and that was it. In addition, I don't think that his trauma was handled that great. In Through The Darkness, Nam-Gil's character had more depth and we saw how his traumatic experiences and the weight of dealing with all of these criminals got the best of him. In Trigger, we didn't get to see it a lot. His character remains complex but on a surface level mostly.

Speaking of Lee Do, I'm sorry but his plot armour became too ridiculous. I could excuse the fact that common citizens like the mentally ill student or the sex offender couldn't hit with weapons. I could excuse him being able to take down whole groups of thugs who were armed with knives. But taking down Moon Baek's guards who held guns while recovering from his injuries? Having people shooting at him from many places without hitting him not even once? Unbelievable. And yes, this is an action series we're talking about, of course realism is not the priority here. But so many things were over the top to the point I couldn't take them seriously.

And now, Moon Daek. A wasted potential of a villain. He had a tough childhood: being raised from people involved in child trafficking, having his eye ripped off, getting sent to US only to end up at the hands of another child trafficking organization...Of course he would want to seek revenge and it's logical that he grew up to believe that violence is the key for justice and vengeance. But the way he was written was superficial.

For the majority of the series, he was either behaving like an energetic puppy (before his reveal) and then he settled at serving face and smugness. Which was fine by me, I still enjoyed him but I wanted more. We saw that he is meticulous and dangerous but his character wasn't given more depth. If anything, the way he explained his motive was ridiculous which again, makes sense, his sense of justice is kinda ridiculous in the first place but since he was supposed to mirror Lee Do, he should have been written better. After the reveal, the writing for his character felt lazy.

The ending was just all over the place. In the last two episodes everything was happening too fast and the final climax was not a satisfactory pay-off after all of this buildup. Some of the side characters were not provided a good conclusion either. Like, what happened with Gyu-jin and his bullies? Was Oh Kyeong-Suk arrested for killing the politician? The ending was wrapped up too roughly and at this point, I really hope that a second season will be made.

Even though the premise of a society where everyone can get to hold a gun is not groundbreaking, the questions that arise about this matter could be great food for thought. To what extent can people have the freedom of self-defense and how much does it require to be pushed off their limits in order to snap? The series tried to explore these themes but it did it very superficially. Instead of focusing on the action, it should have focused more on the political and psychological part. The first two episodes had this direction and the rest should have been the same. We wasted too much time on side characters, of "telling and not showing" and in the end, I don't think that the goal was achieved.

All in all, I do not regret watching Trigger. It's by no means a terrible drama and I would strongly recommend it to fans of action and thrillers. But if you expect a deeper exploration of guns violence and justice, you might be disappointed. I think that a second season is possible to happen since the organization responsible for the guns trafficking is still on-going and since we didn't actually see Moon Baek get killed. So let's hope for that because that ending was not worth it.

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