Review of The K2 / 더 케이투

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I’ve been running a little series for a while now where I revisit old television shows and movies I’ve watched throughout the years. Even in the past, before I started this blog and began taking it more seriously, I was always jotting down what I wrote about XYZ show or movie.

As I return to these shows, I find myself really returning to a specific year: 2016. A lot of the blog posts coming out in the past few days are of Korean dramas that came out in 2016, or right around it. I was sixteen during this year, and still in high school back in Baltimore, so it’s like a little nostalgia blast every time I come back to these shows.

Today’s blog post is dedicated to The K2. I had vague memories of this show and its main plot, so coming into this show a second time was a little like watching the show for the first time in other ways. In the end, everything did come back to me, even though I had no notes to refer to with this show specifically.

Let’s get into the review! I know introductions can be quite long, so I don’t want to keep rambling.

A former mercenary is hired to protect a specific woman, revealing an intricate political web.

Ji Chang-wook (in the first role I actually ever saw him in, fun fact) stars as the male lead in this drama: Kim Je-ha. He’s a former mercenary who worked in Iraq, and while he was there, he fell in love with a local woman named Raniya. However, all is fair in love and war, and her murder becomes something he is framed for.

He has to flee Iraq and heads back to his native South Korea, where he then is offered a gig with the head of a big security company. Turns out she’s also the wife of a big political figure running for election, Se-joon, and while Je-ha is hesitant about the job, he decides to take it because he knows he can get revenge on the one who killed his lover (who conveniently is the wife’s husband’s rival).

And that’s how Je-ha meets Go An-na, Se-joon’s secret daughter. An-na was never really allowed to be exposed to the outside world, and she doesn’t really know what life is like outside of the four walls of the home she lives inside of. Je-ha is a way to interact with someone outside of her bubble, and since she’s a bit helpless, he feels like he needs to protect her double time.

Throughout the course of the series these two are going to grow very close, which means that Je-ha is going to have to make a decision for love or to go forward with his plan of revenge. This is merged with some other subplots and political games going on, putting each of the characters in a certain sense of danger not predicted at the beginning of the series.

All of this is quite the wild ride, to put it bluntly. If you’re not the biggest fan of damsel in distress stories, then you’re not going to think this is the drama for you. I was frustrated with this show on the second watch because all of this feels like a movie I’ve watched multiple times before (especially Korean ones), but dragged out to fit a television series’ length.

It was honestly quite difficult to get through this show because of this. Ji Chang-wook does what he does best throughout the course of the show, but it also doesn’t help that Im Yoon-ah isn’t that good in this role. I haven’t watched any other dramas with her in it since, so I can’t tell if it’s poor writing for her character (which I also believe is true), or her acting. It could be both.

Overall Thoughts

All in all, this is a show that I would say wasn’t within my taste in the end. I thought that the premise of it was interesting, but as I mentioned before, I feel like this is the plot of a movie I’ve seen before. Having worked as a film critic and running this movie blog, I’ve seen a lot of movies in my lifetime, which is probably none of this really felt original for me.

It’s very 2016 as well. This is a sentiment that I come up with quite a bit while I revisit these shows, and some shows feel like they could be timeless without this element. However, I felt like The K2 is so limited in its writing that it feels stuck in 2016. We’ve been blessed with a lot more good writing lately, so maybe the fate oft his show would be different it was released recently instead.

This is just my opinion, so if you love this show, I’m happy for you. Taste is so incredibly subjective, and neither of us are right or wrong. So if you’re reading this review and debating whether to watch the show or not, know that this is just my opinion, and you might finish it feeling like you loved it. That’s the beauty of personal opinion sometimes.

So go watch it if you’re interested. If not, I wouldn’t force yourself. You’re missing something groundbreaking.

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