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kdrama: City Hunter eps 1-10
Jun. 28th, 2011 12:57 amCity Hunter is, quite simply, the most ridiculously addicting TV show I’ve seen in ages.
No, really. It’s almost embarrassing.
It’s basically about a fake playboy raised to be an evil assassin out for revenge who wants to be a superhero. Or something like that. Dude jumps off buildings a lot and randomly starts wearing a mask halfway through the aired episodes.
The first episode, I admit, almost put me to sleep because it was all the manpainy backstory about how Our Hero, Yoon Sung’s, father and a bunch of other soldiers were betrayed by the Korean government in 1983, and the sole survivor stole Yoon Sung from his mother (Babystealer left her a note saying that her life would be better and she’d be happier without a baby, then he tells Yoon Sung that his mother abandoned him to have an easier life.) and raises Yoon Sung to be his personal killing machine, while he becomes an international drug lord based out of Thailand in order to finance his revenge.
Babystealer is something else. He’d get along great with numerous versions of Merlin though, I think.
Anyway, I think I missed a lot in the first episode because I was whining to calixa that nobody praising it warned me that it started with an hour of manpainy backstory, and that it was a good thing that I was assured I’d like it once we got to the main story.
However! After that is when it gets absurdly addicting. The main story is Yoon Sung and Babystealer getting revenge. Yoon Sung votes for outting all the bad guys’ dirty secrets so that they’ll be humiliated and in jail. Babystealer is all “kill them all and kick their families out on the street.” Yoon Sung would like to not be a murderer so that he can settled down and have a real job and a family some day. Babystealer seems to think that once they get revenge, they’ll go back to Thailand shoot each other in the head or something. Then Yoon Sung goes and falls in love with Na Na, who is the bodyguard of both the president’s teenage daughter and one of the men Babystealer is after.
Na Na is kind of universally awesome and I like Joon Sung a lot when he’s being himself (as opposed to his playboy cover persona, which annoys me a lot) but what makes it great is the Drama. Things that you’d expect to not show up until, like, the last 3 episodes just randomly show up in early episodes for extra twists, and once you hit I think episode 5 practically every episode ends with a cliffhanger that’s basically a game changer. (It’s like the first season and a half of Vampire Diaries, but with secret identities, way way less misogyny and woobifying of rapists and abusers, and no supernatural elements. Uhm…and a completely different plot. But similar Drama and random reveals.)
( spoilery )
Incidentally, this is the first modern kdrama (I mostly watch traditional and fusion sageuks when it comes to kdramas) I've been into and didn't drop relatively early since...Spring Waltz? I may have watched Vineyard Man after that, but while I watched all of it and enjoyed, I wasn't hugely into it.
No, really. It’s almost embarrassing.
It’s basically about a fake playboy raised to be an evil assassin out for revenge who wants to be a superhero. Or something like that. Dude jumps off buildings a lot and randomly starts wearing a mask halfway through the aired episodes.
The first episode, I admit, almost put me to sleep because it was all the manpainy backstory about how Our Hero, Yoon Sung’s, father and a bunch of other soldiers were betrayed by the Korean government in 1983, and the sole survivor stole Yoon Sung from his mother (Babystealer left her a note saying that her life would be better and she’d be happier without a baby, then he tells Yoon Sung that his mother abandoned him to have an easier life.) and raises Yoon Sung to be his personal killing machine, while he becomes an international drug lord based out of Thailand in order to finance his revenge.
Babystealer is something else. He’d get along great with numerous versions of Merlin though, I think.
Anyway, I think I missed a lot in the first episode because I was whining to calixa that nobody praising it warned me that it started with an hour of manpainy backstory, and that it was a good thing that I was assured I’d like it once we got to the main story.
However! After that is when it gets absurdly addicting. The main story is Yoon Sung and Babystealer getting revenge. Yoon Sung votes for outting all the bad guys’ dirty secrets so that they’ll be humiliated and in jail. Babystealer is all “kill them all and kick their families out on the street.” Yoon Sung would like to not be a murderer so that he can settled down and have a real job and a family some day. Babystealer seems to think that once they get revenge, they’ll go back to Thailand shoot each other in the head or something. Then Yoon Sung goes and falls in love with Na Na, who is the bodyguard of both the president’s teenage daughter and one of the men Babystealer is after.
Na Na is kind of universally awesome and I like Joon Sung a lot when he’s being himself (as opposed to his playboy cover persona, which annoys me a lot) but what makes it great is the Drama. Things that you’d expect to not show up until, like, the last 3 episodes just randomly show up in early episodes for extra twists, and once you hit I think episode 5 practically every episode ends with a cliffhanger that’s basically a game changer. (It’s like the first season and a half of Vampire Diaries, but with secret identities, way way less misogyny and woobifying of rapists and abusers, and no supernatural elements. Uhm…and a completely different plot. But similar Drama and random reveals.)
( spoilery )
Incidentally, this is the first modern kdrama (I mostly watch traditional and fusion sageuks when it comes to kdramas) I've been into and didn't drop relatively early since...Spring Waltz? I may have watched Vineyard Man after that, but while I watched all of it and enjoyed, I wasn't hugely into it.