I want to run away from Runaway
Oct. 7th, 2010 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieIt will likely surprise nobody that I was very eager for the action-mystery-romance drama Fugitive (also known as Runaway). I loved (most of) the cast and the writer-director team was the one which brought us Chuno, my favorite drama of the year.
You can imagine my eagerness as I started playing the first episode with shiny new subs courtesy of WithS2.
Sad to say, by the end of the epiode my eagerness was gone and what was left was largely blank astonishment that any team that brought us such an amazing, raw, visceral drama like Chuno could have given us such a pointless waste of celluloid like Runaway. I remember when IRIS was airing last year, some people who were not fans of it criticised it for beng slick but soulless. I did not agree with their assessment (IRIS was my favorite drama of 2009 and I was unhealhily emotionally invested in it - I cried for hours when it ended) but their slam came back to me after I finished episode 1 of Runaway.
Slick but soulless describes this to a T. It is clear money was poured into this and the actors are nothing but competent but all the money cannot help with lack of any emotional connection or any emotional truth in this. And the actors - why shouldn't they acquit themselves OK? A well-trained robot could do well in roles which require this little depth, nuance and emotion (when I think of the wonderful performance Rain turned in for A Love to Kill, I want to strangle someone for wasting his talents this way). None of the characters, with the exception of Lee Jung Jin, bringing all he can to the cliche role of hard-driving cop passed over for promotion in favor of a useless colleague with connections, even register. I need some sort of connection with the characters - I do not have to like them, but I have to at least find them interesting. It's not as if Runaway's plot is so complicated that it can cover over character deficiencies anyway.
It reminds me of one of those Japanese procedurals I do not care for - a sort of cross between Unobore Deka if it was less out there and Tokyo Dogs without the cast chemistry.
Does it have anything positive in it? Well, yes. Any drama that gives me this is doing at least one thing right.
But I can buy a beefcake calendar if that is all I want. It won't take me 20 hours of my life to peruse it.
I am going to give this drama though ep4 - I usually do, to see if a drama improves, they often do. But so far, what a horrible disappointment.
You can imagine my eagerness as I started playing the first episode with shiny new subs courtesy of WithS2.
Sad to say, by the end of the epiode my eagerness was gone and what was left was largely blank astonishment that any team that brought us such an amazing, raw, visceral drama like Chuno could have given us such a pointless waste of celluloid like Runaway. I remember when IRIS was airing last year, some people who were not fans of it criticised it for beng slick but soulless. I did not agree with their assessment (IRIS was my favorite drama of 2009 and I was unhealhily emotionally invested in it - I cried for hours when it ended) but their slam came back to me after I finished episode 1 of Runaway.
Slick but soulless describes this to a T. It is clear money was poured into this and the actors are nothing but competent but all the money cannot help with lack of any emotional connection or any emotional truth in this. And the actors - why shouldn't they acquit themselves OK? A well-trained robot could do well in roles which require this little depth, nuance and emotion (when I think of the wonderful performance Rain turned in for A Love to Kill, I want to strangle someone for wasting his talents this way). None of the characters, with the exception of Lee Jung Jin, bringing all he can to the cliche role of hard-driving cop passed over for promotion in favor of a useless colleague with connections, even register. I need some sort of connection with the characters - I do not have to like them, but I have to at least find them interesting. It's not as if Runaway's plot is so complicated that it can cover over character deficiencies anyway.
It reminds me of one of those Japanese procedurals I do not care for - a sort of cross between Unobore Deka if it was less out there and Tokyo Dogs without the cast chemistry.
Does it have anything positive in it? Well, yes. Any drama that gives me this is doing at least one thing right.
But I can buy a beefcake calendar if that is all I want. It won't take me 20 hours of my life to peruse it.
I am going to give this drama though ep4 - I usually do, to see if a drama improves, they often do. But so far, what a horrible disappointment.
