I have a tangled mix of thoughts and feelings about this show. Overall I think it’s good, and it’s extremely watchable (I binged Part 2 in three days). I’ll attempt to do a pros/cons list.
Pros:
- the writing is overall pretty solid. Dong Eun has quite a few iconic lines of dialogue, and a lot of the character interactions are interesting. The plot is generally well paced and moved quite quickly, which helps keep you engaged. Part 2 delivers on quite a few things that Part 1 sets up, so that’s good. As a fast paced thriller you do need to suspend your disbelief, but that usually just comes with the the territory.
- Dong Eun = A+ protagonist. I love that there is no hand wringing about whether she should get revenge, she is allowed to be dark and go all out on these awful people. Song Hye Kyo does an amazing job portraying the character’s quiet strength but also vulnerability.
- The acting all around is very good. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for Im Ji Yeon, she was truly a memorable and extremely hateable villain. Yeom Hye Ran also gave a great performance. The younger actors were also fantastic.
- Cinematography was excellent.
Cons:
- The romance. It’s so confusing how it just did not work for me. I don’t know at what point in the creative process the male love interest came in, but it felt tacked on. Which is odd, because it doesn’t seem like late addition: the character has an important role in the story and has his own backstory. A big problem might be the fact that the actors have no chemistry, which once again is odd since both of them are good actors. I’m having trouble explaining this, so I’ll use an example: the first time these characters say “I love you” to each other (I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that these two characters say this to each other at some point) they say it in the most bland way, in a scene where it doesn’t feel totally appropriate and there’s no real inciting event to cause them to say it. I don’t know, it seems on paper like this romance should be good but in reality it just didn’t work for me.
- The male love interest has some good lines of dialogue and his backstory is somewhat intriguing but it just never landed for me. Maybe they built too much of a puppy dog image of him initially that I just really had trouble taking him seriously. There’s also just way too much focus on him. In one sense this is a good thing, so he’s not just a one note character and serves no purpose in the story, but the last episode of the show is largely dedicated to him when this is Dong Eun’s story! I just thought that was silly.
- The violence and nudity seemed really gratuitous. I’ll once again use an example to help illustrate my point: there is a good portion of one episode where Hyun Nam is abused by her husband. We already know by this point her husband abuses her, and the scenes were so long that I was questioning why on earth we were still on this plot point when there seems like plenty of plot we needed to get to. The repeated instances of nudity and violence seemed unwarranted and like they were there for shock value, and I found it off-putting.
- Oh also the fact that this was clearly a normal 16 episode show split into two parts just annoys me on principle.
That’s mostly it. Like I said, I think objectively the writing is pretty solid, and I appreciate the unique angle on a revenge story. But the “romance,” main male love interest, and the gratuitous violence/nudity really lowered my opinion of it.