Disney+’s crime noir The Worst of Evil has premiered, and so far, it’s a lot of high-vibe style sacrificed for not a lot of substance. That being said, it still has time to redeem itself (please, please) and actually weave the intricate tale of identity that it promised — if it stops ignoring that little thing called character development.
Editor’s note: This is an Episode 1 review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
EPISODE 1
My disappointment over Episode 1 of The Worst of Evil was palpable. This might be partially my own fault, though, since I’ve spent all of its promotional cycle expecting a character-rich noir with blurred lines culminating in a test of loyalty a la Heartless City. Instead, Episode 1 of this drama was, in my estimation, all blood spatter and no actual heart. Because blood-spatter violence without a story to feed it is just violence for violence’s sake.
The drama opens with an extremely violent gang fight in a building hallway somewhere. Because we’re being dropped into the middle of this fight, we don’t know what’s at stake, but we can feel it in the air. Our hero PARK JOON-MO (Ji Chang-wook) locks eyes with a woman (Im Se-mi) who’s somehow found herself in the middle of this bloodbath and there is a lot of emotion between them. The music soars. Our hero reinvigorates and is ready to cut some more throats. It’s quite a thing, being dropped by a story into Level 10 intensity, but it’s meant to show us the fever pitch to which things will (eventually) climb.
From there, we jump two years in the past and we meet a calmer version of our hero and the woman from the fight. She’s YOO EUI-JUNG, and they’re a cute married couple. But while she’s climbing the ranks (and comes from a family of rank-climbing police), Joon-mo is floundering and unable to get his promotion. We see one particular scene with our couple at Eui-jung’s family’s house, where our hero is needlessly belittled. It’s literally the only characterization we have for Joon-mo at this point, so we have to take it, and assume that he feels inadequate and that that emotion will spur his future decisions.
Concurrent to sad Joon-mo is our other hero JUNG KI-CHUL (Wie Ha-joon). He was also present during the opening fight so we know he’s going to be important, but his storyline doesn’t connect to Joon-mo’s till the very end of the episode. Instead, we spend way too much screen time showing Ki-chul’s rise from nightclub DJ (strangely hilarious), to thug, to brutal druglord with a strong sense of brotherhood — and territory.
You would think since Ki-chul’s genesis story took up most of our episode we would feel like we have some insight on his character, or feel committed to his quest to aggregate power, but sadly the script falls utterly flat here. While touting the brotherhood between him and the neighborhood boys who comprise his posey, it’s impossible to actually feel that brotherhood. I mean, Wie Ha-joon has a crazy good screen presence, and I believe his character is who they tell me he is, but I feel nothing. And if this world of violence and crime is going to do anything, it had better make us feel something along the way.
Soon, Ki-chul is ruling his turf with an iron fist and the drugs coming in and out of Gangnam become a top priority for the Seoul police. They know this requires a special operation, so they decide they need an undercover cop to infiltrate so they can destroy this crime ring from the inside out. Joon-mo is quickly chosen, being both wild enough and desperate enough to rise in the ranks, and Ji Seung-hyun quickly fetches and convinces him. It’s a little too easy, and again, the only things we know about Joon-mo is that he’s a) tired of being looked down on and b) smoking hot. Okay, that last one might be subjective, but seeing a gritty Ji Chang-wook in a t-shirt planning his op was probably the part of this episode I most enjoyed.
Sacrificing character development for plot speed, Joon-mo slides into his undercover operation quite fast, and we don’t really see much inside his character. He learns his cover and puts his acting skills to work — somehow intuiting that he has to be even more of a crazy dog than Ki-chul is in order to win his trust and join the pack.
The two actors are excellent in their first (brief) scene together, and the intensity is super high. But kind of like all the posturing we see happening in the gangster world — where appearing powerful is almost more important than being powerful — that’s actually how I feel about this drama as a whole. It appears gritty and intense, but when you step away, you realize there’s actually nothing giving depth to the story, and that’s where my disappointment stems from. If I’m to care about Joon-mo’s descent into darkness and all the things he’s made to do there — and how his wifey gets involved — I need to know who he is first, and what matters to him.
Speaking of style over substance, the drama does have sharp style. It’s a convincing step back into seedier times, and it’s beautifully shot — purposefully gritty and realistic. I mean, they even manage to make blood spatter and cigarette smoke look poetic (as it should in a noir). But, it might just be me, but when I see poetic blood spatter or cigarette smoke, I want more poetry involved in the actual story. Don’t make the violence and grime purely visceral, but give me something more going on under the surface — this drama should be capable of doing that in spades.
I don’t know why the crime-action genre of late seems to be sacrificing story at the altar of flashiness, but it disappoints me. I think it’s possible to do both — visceral in-your-face action and deep storytelling — and I still have hope that this drama might pull it together in subsequent episodes — but only if it can take a step back from its ~vibe~ and peer into its characters a bit more. The world-building is there, and it’s solid. Now, we just need the characters to come to life as they populate it.