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Star Power Can’t Save Twelve From Becoming a Black Hole of Boredom
Did… did they just blow the entire budget on the actors’ fees and leave nothing for production or writing? Because I’m genuinely flabbergasted at how Twelve managed to fumble so catastrophically when its premise practically wrote itself.
This is a high fantasy Kdrama about the twelve Chinese Zodiac signs living as humans to battle a literal devil, played by none other than Park Hyung-sik. Let me repeat that: Park Hyung-sik, with all his charisma and range, is cast as the ultimate villain — and somehow the show still manages to be mind-numbingly dull. That’s not just wasted potential; that’s malpractice.
On paper, this premise should be unstoppable. It’s epic. It’s mythic. It’s the kind of setup that demands spectacle, rich worldbuilding, and pulse-quickening stakes. Instead, what we get is the narrative equivalent of lukewarm soup: bland, watery, and inexplicably boring.
And boring is the biggest crime of all.
Fantasy doesn’t have the luxury of being dull. Slice-of-life dramas can coast on vibes; fantasy needs momentum and awe. Twelve delivers neither. Two episodes in, and I’m not even remotely hooked. That’s a red flag for an 8-episode series, when you’ve already burned 25% of your runtime and still can’t convince me to care, it’s over.
The pain stings sharper because of the star-studded cast. You don’t assemble names like this and then wrap it in what feels like a film student’s summer project. That’s the vibe here: all the gloss of big casting announcements, but the execution of something thrown together on a shoestring, hoping the actors’ charisma alone would carry it. It’s jarring, like watching A-list actors perform Shakespeare in a high school gym with folding chairs for props.
Even the supposed central hook (Zodiac warriors versus the Devil) feels smothered under bad pacing and directionless storytelling. When your audience is asking by episode two, “Wait, are we getting pranked?” you’ve lost the plot. Literally.
I went into Twelve hyped, expecting a late-summer action fantasy to sink my teeth into. Instead, I’m left gnawing on disappointment. The production feels cheap, the writing lifeless, and the direction uninspired. It’s the uncanny valley of K-dramas: all the big pieces are there, but the soul is missing.
To put it bluntly, Twelve is such a mess it somehow made The 8th Show look like Citizen Kane. And that’s saying something, because The 8th Show was my first and only 1/10 drama. Yet compared to this, even The 8th Show feels like it at least tried to be something. Twelve is just… there. A hollow shell of what could have been, a drama so devoid of energy it manages to turn Park Hyung-sik’s devil into a snore.
If the devil in Twelve is supposed to represent ultimate evil, then maybe the real villain here is X+U Studio, for daring to waste this cast, this premise, and my time.
Final verdict: Twelve is proof that not all star-studded fantasies are worth chasing. Sometimes, the constellation is nothing but burned-out stars.
This is a high fantasy Kdrama about the twelve Chinese Zodiac signs living as humans to battle a literal devil, played by none other than Park Hyung-sik. Let me repeat that: Park Hyung-sik, with all his charisma and range, is cast as the ultimate villain — and somehow the show still manages to be mind-numbingly dull. That’s not just wasted potential; that’s malpractice.
On paper, this premise should be unstoppable. It’s epic. It’s mythic. It’s the kind of setup that demands spectacle, rich worldbuilding, and pulse-quickening stakes. Instead, what we get is the narrative equivalent of lukewarm soup: bland, watery, and inexplicably boring.
And boring is the biggest crime of all.
Fantasy doesn’t have the luxury of being dull. Slice-of-life dramas can coast on vibes; fantasy needs momentum and awe. Twelve delivers neither. Two episodes in, and I’m not even remotely hooked. That’s a red flag for an 8-episode series, when you’ve already burned 25% of your runtime and still can’t convince me to care, it’s over.
The pain stings sharper because of the star-studded cast. You don’t assemble names like this and then wrap it in what feels like a film student’s summer project. That’s the vibe here: all the gloss of big casting announcements, but the execution of something thrown together on a shoestring, hoping the actors’ charisma alone would carry it. It’s jarring, like watching A-list actors perform Shakespeare in a high school gym with folding chairs for props.
Even the supposed central hook (Zodiac warriors versus the Devil) feels smothered under bad pacing and directionless storytelling. When your audience is asking by episode two, “Wait, are we getting pranked?” you’ve lost the plot. Literally.
I went into Twelve hyped, expecting a late-summer action fantasy to sink my teeth into. Instead, I’m left gnawing on disappointment. The production feels cheap, the writing lifeless, and the direction uninspired. It’s the uncanny valley of K-dramas: all the big pieces are there, but the soul is missing.
To put it bluntly, Twelve is such a mess it somehow made The 8th Show look like Citizen Kane. And that’s saying something, because The 8th Show was my first and only 1/10 drama. Yet compared to this, even The 8th Show feels like it at least tried to be something. Twelve is just… there. A hollow shell of what could have been, a drama so devoid of energy it manages to turn Park Hyung-sik’s devil into a snore.
If the devil in Twelve is supposed to represent ultimate evil, then maybe the real villain here is X+U Studio, for daring to waste this cast, this premise, and my time.
Final verdict: Twelve is proof that not all star-studded fantasies are worth chasing. Sometimes, the constellation is nothing but burned-out stars.
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