Reviews

I've noticed this in many South Korean shows. They stretch the story line by double, when it could easily be done in half the time and been more enjoyable. Instead they just repeat the same story beats (and the same terrible k-pop song written specifically for the show).

"That cop says you killed her." "No, the other cop did." "He says you did." "No, he did." "If I find out you did it, I'll kill you." "Ok." etc...

No one actually gives info to each other. They play guessing games, and then look baffled. Lawyer lady begins to help them and just when they're about to get some real answers she yells "Psyche!" and becomes the attorney for the person the cops are trying to get info from.

Everyone knows there is a killer cutting off thumbs, yet they go everywhere alone and don't blanket the town with cameras. If there's a weird noise in the other room, they don't immediately call 911 or check corners, yelling at the top of their lungs. They slowly investigate.

Our young cop finds the evidence they've been looking for the entire season, and does he upload to Dropbox as soon as he gets it? Nope. He's going to let it get stolen while almost being killed in the same apartment his parents were killed (his dad, just a few days earlier by the same killer).

This show started interestingly. They'd spend two episodes including a side story along with the main story, and then after the organ trafficking arc, they lost steam.

I'm tired of reading from morons about how bad movies and television are Netflix's fault. Bad media has been around since the advent of the movie camera. Netflix is a warehouse. The stories aren't generated within the company and they are no different than any network or studio. People come to Netflix with their ideas, and the projects are purchased hoping for a hit. Just like every other media outlet. At least they have a variety. Disney+ doesn't have Jack but Marvel, Star Wars and cartoons we've already seen a hundred times. Even Amazon can't compete with the amount of Netflix product, And yes, there will be quite a few stinkers, but they don't own exclusive rights to those.

That being said, this movie had me shouting at it more often than usual. People acting stupidly. People acting slowly to impending danger. The bad guys are old people; one push and they'd shatter their hips, so I don't get why the young folk are behaving like they're being attacked by werewolves.

Why does the ex-husband's girlfriend suddenly change from a likable character who gets along with her boyfriend's family to being a nutjob willing to sacrifice the man's ex-wife and children? There's no motivation. She saw them dancing together at a wedding and that tipped her scales. The ex-spouses were dancing with their children, who will ALWAYS BE their children. If she's that easily swayed, the cracks in her armor would've shown long before this.

The daughter is freaked out because she can't contact her booty call while her parents keep asking about her brother? I woulda smacked the little brat demanding the whereabouts of my son. And don't get me started on another movie kid with asthma (the alternative is always diabetes). With the amount of dust and pollen we see floating in front of the lens, that kid should never have been there in the first place.

The super evil old guy kills a number of people, and instead of wasting him, they tape him to a stove? Minutes before they killed a pensioner with a fire poker for just standing in the hallway.

These are just a couple examples people acting stupidly.

Good writing is when you can tell an exciting story without relying on tired cliches. Do better.

It started off with a good first scene, discovering the body and then went down hill. I didn't care about any of the side plots involving her family, especially since they added nothing and I'm tired of these cop shows having family members in dire straits. It was simply filler to try and get to 8 episodes. There were too many characters to keep the main plot coherent. I'm still not sure who the main bad guy was and how he seemed to be a super genius with the ability to find out everything about the cops' lives. He could also pilot a drone, operate a ferry boat, and kill people in elaborate ways while painting symbols in hard to reach places. I clocked him as soon as I saw him in the hospital in an earlier episode. They lingered on him just a tad too long and he had an interesting appearance. Then we've got our hero cops who go to locations by themselves multiple times (without informing headquarters), and almost get killed. There's a ridiculous subplot with a dead husband who was having an affair but also linked to the pharmaceutical part of the story. Oh, and our two cops make out in what feels like a completely ridiculous. Forced plot point. Stick to the first two seasons.

Of the three or four seasons of this series I've seen, this was the best so far. I liked these characters and actors much more than Hu Ba Yi and Fatty (would it kill hem to use the same actors?). There were certainly more people getting shot in the head more than in the other series.

My big complaint is the ending. We spent 21 episodes watching Partridge Whistle and Red Girl growing closer together. In the last few minutes they agree they will get married, but PW decides to continue looking for the "dust ball," and RG will stay behind and wait for him. Why can't she go with him! They just shared a huge adventure together. He could've waited for her leg to heel and then they could've gone off together. Instead we get a narration as PW is walking away saying "A few month later the plague comes to town and RG drops dead." What kind of B. S. ending is that? We just watched this tough ass, knife throwing chick for 21 episodes, and she dies offscreen from the sniffles. I don't know if that's in the books, since there are no English translations. But that's like if at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, while in the final shot of the movie there was a VO telling us Indy went on other adventures and Marion dropped dead from a snake bite. It's just bad storytelling.

Everyone is an idiot except the Moriarty-esque bad guy, who seems like he's just a blue collar criminal used to knocking over laundromats. Not only is he always a step ahead of everyone, he's the Terminator who can keep getting up from being hurt to go after the kid he kidnapped. And the kid, every time he screamed "Ah Huat" in his cracking pubescent voice, you wanted the bad guy to hurry up and kill him.

The baby mama of the bad guy, who is currently married to a rich guy (who is the father of a kid the bad guy intended to kidnap, but nabbed the wrong one) had multiple opportunities to save the kidnapped kid, or get the cops to surround the Internet cafe, or basically just drop a flower pot on top of the bad guy's head. And what does she do when seemingly given the chance to walk away with her daughter? She turns her back on the bad guy, who she knows has killed already and is perfectly content with murdering children, and gets shanked. She dies almost instantly. Meanwhile our cab driver father of the kidnapped boy, gets beaten up, peed on, kidney removed, and rammed by a car, yet keeps on ticking. One stab, and the lady is instantly dead (and no, he didn't stab her in the base of the neck, severing her spinal cord).

There's the subplot of the cabby's ex-wife wanting the kid to live with her in Australia, and the ending has dad taking the kid to the airport to spend his birthday with his mom. Sorry, but after all the stuff that went down, I'm sure the cabby would've lost all parental rights, and given a restraining order requiring him to keep a couple continents between him and his son. The cabby should also be sterilized so as not to be able to father anymore offspring.

But if you like yelling at characters on the screen, or smacking your head at the stupidity onscreen, give this one a go.

Besides the cops having multiple opportunities to shoot the possessed people to get rid of the serial killer, we have to sit through a third act that's mostly fake so there can be a ridiculous twist? Why is there a miscellaneous department if you only staff it with idiots? If it's such an important department, shouldn't it have better funding and more staff?

A serial killer can go around possessing people, then why wouldn't a Navy Seal possess bad guys to go after other bad guys? What makes the serial killer special? What are the supernatural rules to this movie? None of these cops take precautions to protect their loved ones.

Disappointing.

How are the police continually outmaneuvered by a half-blind guy with no depth perception? At one point he's being chased by half a dozen cops, and they all fail in capturing him.

Later, our hero cop (stupid cop), who is constantly causing others to be hurt because of his stupidity, finds the kidnapped girl after climbing up some scaffolding. Instead of calling for backup and keeping an eye on the girl, he climbs back down to tell the mother and another cop they found her. After a race to get to the apartment she's in, half-blind guy manages to escape again.

The cops find half-blind guys' invalid wife and get her onto an ambulance, which half-blind guy spies from a block away. Somehow he manages to get on the ambulance before it takes off, and once again foils the cops.

Stupid cop tracks half-blind guy to a darkened warehouse, not calling for backup, and the little girl rescues herself and finds stupid cop. Half-blind guy (who can only see in black & white) manages to track stupid cop and the girl in total darkness and keeps getting the upper hand on stupid cop.

Eventually stupid cop gets knocked out and half-blind guy corners the girl, who accidentally gets herself covered in a ton of dirt. Stupid cop hits half-blind guy in the back of the head with a rock with such force, his brains should've shot out his nose. Stupid cop digs the girl out from under the ton of dirt and cries to the heavens for the girl to wake up, Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? He should've been under that ton of dirt instead of her. But the girl wakes up just in time for half-blind guy (now total-blind guy) to wake up. He wants stupid cop to take him to his wife. Instead of granting his wish, stupid cop should've been jumping up and down on total-blind guys' head. But he's not called stupid-cop for nothing.

Little girl is reunited with her mother, giving us a happy ending. Of course the bad guys who hired total-blind guy to kidnap the girl are still out there, as is the big criminal boss who was on trial and vowed vengeance on the little girls' prosecutor mother. But I guess that's no biggie.

The action is fun, but the acting, dialogue, and character behavior make it almost unwatchable. Every "good" cop is an idiot who put themselves in obvious situations that will get them murdered. Simon Lam's oversized David Byrne suit makes him look like a clown. I'm sure it all comes down to cultural differences, and it makes total sense in Hong Kong.

Nearly all the characters would prefer an innocent man be executed in order to preserve their own feelings. They could actually live with themselves after condemning someone to death for a crime they didn't commit?

How do our hero detectives not get that the bad detectives (who they know are bad) will continue to do bad things?

Why wouldn't news lady leak that footage proving the innocent guy was innocent the moment she received it?

How could super lawyer not have had an expert examine the footage of the innocent man, after making a big deal about the tampered footage from the guy they suspect? No one in their meetings said "Should we check our video too, so it's beyond reproach?"

Either all police stations in Korea use the same blueprints to build their departments, or all Korean cop shows use the same set with slight alterations.

She makes herself bait without informing the police or anyone. She doesn't carry any kind of defense. What was the plan?

Meanwhile the cops arrive en masse at the location where she's about to get murdered, and only one cop runs in her direction while everyone else stands around like idiots. The cab driver tells the cops where he saw her, and the cops don't make him take them to the location? It's frustrating when such idiotic devices are used in storytelling.

I don't know if the filmmakers thought sprinkling in humor about a 12 year old psychopathic rapist, would make it more palatable, but it didn't. Instead, throwing in lite music and some jokes makes me think the filmmakers think a story about a 12 year old psychopathic rapist is funny. It they had treated it like We Need to Talk About Kevin, or Funny Games, they could've had a real piece of contemporary horror on their hands.

The show starts off horrific, with a brutal murder. On a dime it switches to goofy comedy with the Keystone Kops being incompetent at their jobs. Even the music is goofy. Then we get a melodramatic romance. The show switches moods constantly, and I'm not sure if the producers knew what show they wanted to make. It definitely didn't need to be 16 episodes. It could've been half as long if they cut out all the crying, and montages to terrible love songs. We also didn't need the bad guy to hope around so many bodies, basically restarting the whole show. We got the point. Bad guy is super evil and will kill people. Everybody dies except the annoying landlord lady, and for what purpose? Were the producers going for emotional torture porn? Why would I ever re-watch this if I know everyone is doomed? The bad guy won, even though they try to be clever in the end, hinting that things will be ok for our two main characters? What about everyone else? Bad guy said he'd destroy good guy's world, and he did. I didn't need 16 episodes for that.

I've asked this before, but is constant crying a trope of Korean film/television? Like singing in a Bollywood movie? Every Korean thing I've seen, characters break down and wail like a Brazillian soccer player faking an injury. Is it a cultural thing?

If you're going to watch, do it for the main actress. She was good.

Look at the dates they were put up. Obviously written by family, friends, producers, etc.

It was an average show with an utterly incompetent hero. She wants to solve cases but doesn't want to take the detective exam because her cop dad supposedly killed her mom and then tried to kill himself? Instead she'll be a clerk in the Homicide division, being reminded of her father daily and butting in on cases that would be illegal for her to interfere in? Not only that, but she still lives in the house where her mother was killed, but just keeps the door locked? Who wants to live in a "murder house?"

She is directly responsible for the deaths of four (and maybe more) people because of her incompetence, yet we're supposed to root for her? She's tailing a killer and then loses him (while recording everything on audio that she doesn't use to arrest the bad guy)? Why didn't she involve anyone else in tailing this guy? Why didn't she call the guy who keeps hitting on her, or the coroner to help her tail this guy? Why don't you use a SAT phone so you'll be sure not to lose a call?

She knows the bad cop lady visited her dad in the nursing home and tortured him with cigarettes, but she doesn't do anything about it? She also knows bad cop lady tried to kill her on the road, and does nothing about it? Sure, the whole police force is corrupt but she doesn't contact every news source in Brazil? She's totally cool with killing a guy with acid, but she doesn't go after the people who murdered her mother and threaten her family?

She was already in the vicinity of the bad guy's lair, so why does she need to follow the clues that Janet left in her puzzle books? Just drive to the place where you lost them the first time, and pick up the trail from there. She only missed him by around 300 yards the first time. And she didn't follow the shotgun blasts the first time around? The bad guy was still in the area, cuz he had to bury the body.

Then at the end she's going to become La Femme Nikita?

Write smarter. Your protagonist doesn't have to make idiotic mistakes in order to propel the story forward. And please stop threatening the hero's family in these cop shows. It's such a cliche (like the retiring police captain). While we're at it, no more perfectly rectangular grave holes that in no way could've been created with a shovel.

This ticked every cliche box in the generic spy movie playbook. It was nothing special, and I'll forget it by tomorrow. All the amazing reviews are either studio plants or the kind of people who thought Bridge of Spies was good (good as a cure for insomnia, sure). I felt nothing for any of them, and you knew how it would play out before the credits rolled.

They also did the real Grenville Wynne a disservice by stating he died peacefully in 1990. He died of throat cancer and suffered depression and alcoholism after being released from the Soviet Union. That would've been a more interesting story. His life after spying.