Kill It (2019)

The thing that strikes me about Kill It was that the underlying story was compelling. Horrible? Sure. A little ridiculous? Definitely. But if it is the role of art to exaggerate to teach, then Kill It had a lot to say about the commodification of people.

So it’s a damn shame that it didn’t say anything at all.

Kim Soo Hyun (played with the charisma of a dead tree log by the usually appealing Jang Ki Yong) is a veterinarian who is also a professional killer. Lee Young Eun (played with weirdly inappropriate sexual overtones by Nana) is a former ballerina turned cop who is chasing him. These two have a childhood connection around a shared trauma that brings them back together again and exposes a horrible conspiracy around experimentation on unwanted children.

Part of the problem is that I didn’t connect with any of the characters so didn’t really care what happened to them (with the possible exception of Kim Soo-hyun, whose arc was strangely under-developed considering he was the male lead). And the reason for that was entirely in the approach the writers took to tell the story.

Telling the story of these children from the ground up would have been a dark but fascinating story. But instead the show chose to tell the story from the other side.

Blank-faced assassins, helpless damsels, and rich men sitting around scheming just isn’t that interesting – unless the blank-faced assassin is dogmatic and determined and his motivation is entirely about revenge for the horrors visited upon him. A half-hearted blank-faced assassin who’d rather be playing with puppies might sound good on paper but this is supposed to be a Korean action/thriller, not a Guy Ritchie film.

They should have concentrated on the human aspect of the bioethics issue rather than throwing things together in some sort of plot soup of hit men, drug runners, organ smugglers, chaebols, corrupt politicians and human traffickers. That would have been a really tragic and compelling story.

I’ve come to realise that action thrillers are suffering from the same problem that romcoms are. They’re written from a template and the only thing that changes is the [insert childhood trauma caused by evil scheming chaebols] plot outline.

I also think the writers were trying to give a Healer vibe but Healer wasn’t a stone-cold killer for a reason and Healer had clear reasons for every decision he made. Which brings us to the way in which this show ultimately fell down: the core relationship between our male and female leads. At least, I think this was supposed to be our core relationship. The problem is it never made much sense.

I never knew if I was supposed to be shipping them, feeling aggrieved that she was being lied to, seeing this as some of doomed tragic love story, or what. I felt none of those things. Apart from the odd maelstrom of misplaced sexual longing, these two never connected: either as childhood friends or adults brought together by circumstance. Certainly not as potential lovers (although I live for the day a kdrama is brave enough to go there).

As a consequence, what this show lacked was an emotional core. It disassociated its characters from the emotional resonance of what had happened to them and so it failed to resonate with us, the viewer, as well.

The saddest thing about writing this is I can’t even mock the show in the end. It had all the ingredients of a much better drama. It’s not that bad, it’s just generic – even boring.

There’s no need to see it – you already have.

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