burhaa aadmi

Sometimes, slow is slow

The first half of this Drama was 'artfully slow'. I enjoyed its unhurried contemplative approach, a difference from the usual style of revenge Dramas. But somewhere around the halfway mark, the writer obviously decided that if "revenge is a dish best served cold", this Drama should climax just after the heat death of the Universe.

From being unhurried, it dropped to a crawl, painful and tedious and pointless. In my personal watchlist, the vast majority of slower Dramas that I've scored highly are JDramas, but there are some slower K Drama gems too, like One Day Off. This one was just EXCRUCIATING. So much of nothing happening and happening at a pace that makes tectonic shift seem dizzylingly fast.

For a truly outstanding summary of what went wrong with this Drama I recommend MinJi's review


https://kisskh.at/profile/MinJi23/review/269917

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Short and FUN

I dropped the K-drama Suspicious Partner after 10 of its 40 30 minute episodes. It felt to me like the female lead had no agency, I found the male lead's behaviour patronisingly possessive to the point of being borderline creepy – which is saying something given that the lead was played by JCW. I was interested to subsequently learn that many reviews on MDL from people who liked it still complained that the drama got draggy, bloated and lost its way for much of the middle third to three-quarter mark.

The 2025 Japanese remake is almost certainly not to everyone's taste, but no one could accuse it of being bloated or draggy. At a total run time of just over 4.5 hours as opposed 20 hours for the original, it's an amuse-bouche. I chose that phrase quite deliberately because there was a lot of amusement in it. The overriding impression I got of this drama was its creative team opted to focus on fun.

75 to 80% of the drama was light and frothy and there were a lot of laughs. The laughs were comical, not simply comedic. By that, I mean that the humour could have come from a comic. There has been discussion on bluesky recently about the influence of anime and manga on J-dramas and to me the humour in this J-drama was a very good example. It was slightly absurdist and silly, quite knowingly and deliberately so, and gave a clear impression that the last thing it intended to do was take itself seriously. This made me very happy, since that ability to laugh at itself is vanishingly rare in K-dramas.

Since I abandoned the original only one quarter of the way through, I can't comment on how the storyline is unfolded, but in the Japanese drama the serial killer was kept in his proper place — a significant element of the story but not the prime ingredient.

The female lead was a little too much like the stereotypical J-Drama romance female lead, but as the story progressed she stood on our own feet, made her own decisions, and it was great to see the male lead allow her to do so.

If I had any major complaint about the drama, it might be that it is a little too short. If the 12 episodes had been 30 minutes instead of 24, there could have been a little bit more character development, more chance for the female lead to outgrow the kawaii doll phase of the early part of the drama, and a less rushed, more cohesive conclusion. But overall, a surprisingly pleasant short treat.

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Very Nearly Perfect

The impact of Netflix's involvement in Korean dramas has been the subject of a lot of debate. This drama shows that its involvement has not been all bad. Love to Hate You was an outstanding example of the genre that for a long time seemed to be dead, or dying, in K dramas— the pure romcom.There were no serial killers, no dark, malicious arc at all. Instead, this drama did something quite revolutionary. It was a pure romcom with a powerful, positive message about gender roles and hypocrisy in Korean society.

It shared that message without preaching by the simple medium of creating a female lead who lived the message. Throughout the drama the point was made that Yeo Mi Ran's behaviour was in no way different from that which is not merely tolerated but almost expected of men in Korea, but vilified and socially criminalised for women.

A perfect propaganda puff piece is very difficult to pull off, but this drama managed it and the casting of Kim Ok Bin in that lead role was inspired. I have followed her career since being involved in the fan subbing for her 2014 drama Yoona's Street, and one thing that annoyed me about that drama was that despite being (at the time) a 4th Dan in hapkido, not only did her character never get to show that, she also needed rescuing by the male lead. In the years that followed, I learned that this was quite common - female actors with serious martial arts skills having to play characters who were nothing more than damsels in distress needing to be saved by a man. In this drama, Mi Ran explicitly condemns that trope, and free-diver/boat-driver/martial artist Kim Ok Bin gets plenty of opportunities to demonstrate her own action junkie skills. Kudos to all involved for that decision.

Seeing a female lead who was literally empowered to take care of herself and stand up for others was refreshing, but just as refreshing was the fact that this romcom was genuinely funny. As a general rule K drama comedy and I get along almost as well as Seoul and Pyongyang, but I laughed so much throughout this drama. The romance was well handled too. For once there was a romantic K drama with a thirtysomething female lead who was not a giggling virginal child, and that fact was central to much of the story. It was refreshingly realistic, and kept cringing eye rolling moments to a minimum. I also loved the way the drama showed different sets of exes coming to terms with their past and moving beyond it. Using their words - mature, adult, thoughtful behaviour, almost unheard of in KDrama romcoms.

On a personal note, I loved the casting of this drama. Three of the actors have been favourites of mine for some time. First of all Kim Sung Ryung: when I started watching K drama is back in 2013 she quickly became my Noona crush - so gorgeous, so glamorous. So it was great to see her given a role here that was a celebration of women in her situation and stage of life. Next up Go Won Hee. Another actor I've always found aesthetically appealing, but this drama was perhaps the most satisfying sidekick-dongsaeng role yet. She seems to be making that kind of character her own, and in this drama she got to deliver laughs and love. Brava! Finally Choi Yoon So. She caught my eye in the very first time I ever saw her in and then she disappeared from Dramas of the genres I watch. Her introduction in this Drama as the apparently telepathic interpreter for the mute director was very entertaining, and her character avoided all of the usual stereotypical pitfalls of that particular kind of role.

I was very close to scoring this drama 10/10, until the public proposals. I absolutely HATE public proposals, and consider them as nothing less than crude emotional blackmail. It is my serious wish that every single person proposed to publicly, whether in a crowd of people on a street or on a Jumbotron at a stadium, emphatically rejects the proposal. The final episode of this Drama contains TWO. I was actually prepared to let the first one slide because it made sense in context. The second however was stereotypical, clichéd and just plain awful. Even in drama this good there can be no excuse for that kind of blatant manipulation. For that unforgivable lapse , I scored this drama all the way down from 10/10 to 9.9/10. Putting it inside the top 5% of the 330 3K dramas I have finished as of the time of writing.

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Simply superb

I put off watching this drama when it was released because fantasy is not a genre I normally enjoy. I now regret waiting four years, this drama was outstanding.

When it was first released, the creator of the drama was reported as making comments that astounded me, and that have always stuck with me. They said that they created this drama specifically and explicitly for Ko Chia Yen. That is a remarkable tribute to her as an actor. I have heard of individual movies that were created with a particular actor in mind, films that the writer and/or director have said could not have been made without that specific person in that particular role, but I have never ever heard of a 15.5 hour runtime drama that was created specifically to give a vehicle to one particular actor. Having completed the drama, it makes perfect sense that the one particular actor was THIS actor.

Ko Chia Yen's performance was phenomenal. Not just in playing characters at different ages, but playing two completely different characters at different ages. Because of the nature of the storyline she was at times playing an unstable introverted teenager who was playing an outgoing adult who was playing as that unstable introverted teenager. Layers upon layers, and she nailed it every time.

Of course, as exceptional as her performance was, the drama would not have worked if she had been carrying substandard performances from the other leads. Hats off to all those involved in the casting of the other main roles. Greg Hsu and Patrick Shih rose to the challenge of their roles superbly. A special word of praise has to go to Patrick Shih. The layered, Inception-style nature of the storyline meant that his was a distinctive and different kind of a second male lead role, full of nuance and complexity. His delivery of the role was moving, conveying the pathos of the characters situation perfectly.

The romance at the heart of the drama also would not have worked had the casting been off. The on-screen chemistry between Ko Chia Yen and Greg was palpable. The brief little thank you BTS they hastily put together after the drama aired was a wonderful glimpse into the professionalism of all involved - Ko Chia Yen being bleeped out when she commented on having to refer to the six years younger Greg as "Li Zi Wei gege" was funny, but it was also a nice reminder that this was a performance by highly skilled and trained professionals who told a well-written story exceptionally well.

There were a couple of flaws that prevented this from getting a score of 10 from me. The first were the 'comic relief' characters featured prominently in the early episodes, especially Kun Bu. I felt sorry for the actor playing that character because the role was superfluous and tonally grating. It was interesting that her character was easier to take later in the drama when she was playing a younger version of herself, she was less clownish at 19-20 than 26-27.

The other and more significant flaw for me was the "big bad" arc. The deranged psychopath was a plot device to generate tension and danger for all four of the leads – both of Ko Chia Yen's characters, and the two male leads. However, I felt that it was unnecessary, or at the very least excessive and over-emphasised. It was obvious right from episode one that the biggest danger to Chen Run Yu was internal, not external. The stunning performance in the penultimate episode when Chen Run Yu and Huang Yu Xuang went head-to-head really demonstrated that. Their interactions showed that there was little need for a somewhat crudely cartoonish external villain to generate an existential threat, when Chen Run Yu carried the biggest threat inside herself.

The prominence given to that external villain seemed to be a nod to a tradition in Taiwanese dramas, the apparent need to include elements of Makjang. It also contributed to the drama suffering from a very common flaw with Taiwanese dramas, that of being longer than it needed to be. Reducing the prominence of the role given to the psychopathic villain and perhaps reducing or eliminating the comic relief roles could have shaved one whole episode of the drama and would have made it even better than it was.

A somewhat controversial opinion here – the ending was just a few seconds too long. At the VERY end of the Drama, the creative team made EXplicit what had been made IMplicit seconds earlier, and I thought was a bit of a shame. Ending with the child actor would have been absolutely PERFECT, imo. Less is more. A very minor niggle, though.

That it was a little longer than it needed to be made me think of the Korean remake, which is 25% shorter. It was the airing of the remake that prompted me to finally get around to watching the original. I wanted to watch the original before I watched the remake. Having been blown away by the original, I will not now be watching the remake.

I hope that all who do watch the remake enjoy it, and I'm sure that this will be especially true for those who have not seen the original, but there are two reasons why I think it is fundamentally impossible for the remake to match the original.

First, the casting. The fact that this drama was created specifically for one particular actor, who was obviously the very core of the entire drama from beginning to end, means that any remake is missing a certain something. When the remake was first announced, long before it was filmed, it got a black mark in my scorebook for the fact that they went out of their way to cast the male lead first. This was a drama that was created specifically for the FEMALE lead, she was the reason the show existed at all, the fact that the Korean production chose to prioritise the casting of the male lead said to me that they had missed the fundamental point of the show's existence.

The other reason why I don't think the remake could ever be considered as good as the original is simply that - the original was ORIGINAL. It was inventive and creative and put well used elements like time travel and love triangles and internal conflict together in ways that, at least in my 600 dramas, I've never seen. That creativity and originality is something that no remake could have. No matter how good any remake is, it's working with pre-existing material. The bulk of the really hard work has already been done. And, of course, no remake would have Ko Chia Yen in the role.

This drama reminded me why watching East Asian dramas has been a major hobby of mine for 10 years. When they are good they are very good, and few come better than this one. I hope others try it, and I really hope they try the original first.

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The Snare of Pride

Pulling your own teeth out would be more fun than watching this show, so why did I finish it? Because of pride and vanity. I was certain from episode 1 that I knew who the "big bad" was, and proceeded to suffer 16 hours of mind-numbing, brain-rotting awfulness for the cheap transient satisfaction of being proved right. IT WAS NOT WORTH IT

Anyone who has ever watched K Dramas centred on the police know that the Dramas last as long as they do because the combined IQ of all the Police in the Drama is slightly less than that of your average brain-damaged rock. This Drama was no exception to that rule, but it did throw in criminals who were just as incompetent and devoid of sentience. Learn from my mistake and find a better and more enjoyable way to spend 17 hours of your life - dumpster diving for rotten fish, for example

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Putting the "meh" in "mehdiocre"

I stuck with this one on the strength of its fantastic opening sequence. If only it had stayed like that through. At 24 episodes, it's short by contemporary C Drama standards, but it felt so much longer and was a chore to get through.

What I didn't like:

The lead as a teen was a patronising git. If I had a single yuan for every time he "affectionately" belittled the female lead, calling her ugly, stupid or variants (and combinations thereof), I could buy Beijing. That ain't romantic. And the reasons for his noble idiocy as revealed in the final episode were both stupid and mind-numbingly clichéd

The Second male lead was the worst kind of "no never means no" stalker. His antics as a teen especially were ALL about him. His love was one-sided and it was all for him. How SHE felt was basically irrelevant, and anything he did was ok because it was "love". Ai carumba (pun intended)

Why I stayed. There were intermittent flashes throughout the Drama of the sort of spark shown in the opening of episode 1. Also, REALLY loved Luo Zhi, and her story arc was a big reason I didn't drop. It caused me to add "Unrequited Love" to my watchlist, although I was disappointed that the same actor is not playing her in that Drama.

In summary, not awful, but one I shouldn't have wasted my time on.

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No apologies? Sorry, I'm done

The OTP in this Drama had real promise, and I enjoyed the first ten or so. Then they started doubling down on the tsundere. The ML got worse and worse in terms of his refusing to apologise for all the hurt he caused the FL and being angry at her all the time when he was in the wrong. SHE kept apologising, despite having done nothing wrong.

The clincher for me was in episode 21 when, instead of apologising for his behaviour, he grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her away and said "now you need to trust me" No apologies, no explanations, just the AWFUL wrist grab and "trust me, because I"M A MAN" I got so angry I just had to drop.

I don't mind tsundere in small doses, but this archaic trope of the bullying bruised rich kid who expects that "his" woma n will understand and excuse everything he does without question is not remotely romantic. When the Drama is nearly 2/3 done, there should be clear evidence of growth in the character. Blaming the FL and expecting her to be the one to say sorry for the "sin" of not having blindly trusted the ML who gave her no cause to trust is aggravating. Dragging a woman by the wrist is ugly and repellent and a trope that needs to die - NOW.

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If you like an ML who's a decent human being - AVOID

I started this short Drama because I've seen the "for abet" trope done well. This was AWFUL, and it's all because of the utterly repellent ML. The guy had the moral integrity of and spine of a diseased worm, and yet the Drama kept insisting we should be sorry for him. The Fl gave him a free pass for his abhorrent compliance and cowardly failure to speak up, but there's no way I will. I FFd through to the end hoping for 2 things - the villain getting some karme and the ML growing into something that could possibly be mistaken for a decent human being. In the end, all we got was feeble shadow of both. The ML's "growth" was too little, too late.

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A Sentimental Journey

I started this film expecting a sweet, feel-good story of personal triumph. It was that, but it should also have carried a trigger warning: May induce brony bawling.

Another reviewer described it as uneven and illogical, and complained about the way it switched focus from a youth romance kind of story to one with much more pathos (the bawling bit). LIFE is uneven and illogical, and sudden shifts in the emotional tone of life are very, very real. I spent much of the last 30 minutes literally bawling out loud, thanks to the powerful performances from an old favourite, and an actor I've barely seen.

The old favourite is Lee Sung Min. I've loved him every since Miss Korea (best K Drama STP EVAH, if you haven't watched it, DO!) and he shone here as the self-repressed Dad. The actor I've barely seen before was Lee Soo Kyung. I absolutely lvoed her character and her performance and was watching to see how her story turned out. The answer was not the one I'd have hoped for. But I will be looking out for her from now on, hoping to see her shine in a brighter story,

I was also really impressed with Yoona. One reviewer said that the ML actor never looked like a high schooler while praising Yoona's eternal youth. That made me smile as she's only 3 years younger than the ML actor and she too NEVER looked like a high schooler in this film. But that didn't matter because both did well. I can't comment on the quality and authenticity of her satoori, but it sounded ok to me, and that she delivered real emotion in it shows how far she's come as an actor.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched this movie, and glad I did so alone, so that my loud crying didn't disturb anyone else 😁

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