Ever wondered what would happen if the girl you’re flirting with turned into a chicken nugget? As we learn in the new Netflix absurdist comedy, Chicken Nugget — which is about just that — you’ll need more than Naver to figure out how to change her back. Instead, it’ll take ingenuity, sleuthing, teaming up with your crush’s father, and — most importantly — ensuring the nugget of your affection stays hydrated in her sweet-and-spicy dipping sauce.
Editor’s note: This is an opening review only. For a place to chat about the entire drama, visit the Drama Hangout.
EPISODES 1-2
This is the weirdest mess I’ve ever seen. Whether or not you’ll find that endearing enough to endure will depend on your threshold for open-mouthed guffaws and wriggling around on the floor in exaggerated existential pain. That’s not to say there are no funny jokes here — there are. But in the first hour (out of five), I spent as much time lol’ing as I did wanting to skip to the next scene.
Based on a webtoon, our story starts in a comic-book-color world, where GO BAEK-JOONG (Ahn Jae-hong) is a sprightly intern at More Than Machines, a company that centers on (from what I can see) only machines. Aside from Baek-joong, the company has two other employees — the boss, CHOI SUN-MAN (Ryu Seung-ryong), and co-worker KIM HWAN-DONG (Kim Nam-hee).
Right away, the stakes are set. Somewhat nerdy Baek-joong has a crush on the boss’s only daughter, CHOI MIN-AH (Kim Yoo-jung), who has a thing for kind-hearted men — so long as they have a nice face and good body. Cut to a montage of Baek-joong lifting dual fire extinguishers and hefty boxes of paper at the office to get fit before considering plastic surgery for his face.
The next time Min-ah comes to visit, Baek-joong shows off his newly sculpted forearms but she’s not impressed. Still, she’s brought a box of deep-fried chicken nuggets slathered in sauce for them to share, and their adorably awkward lunchtime conversation clues us in to the fact that she’s not totally dismissing him (“You’re on your way to becoming good-looking,” she tells him).
These brief introductory moments between Ahn Jae-hong and Kim Yoo-jung are gold — cute, funny, tender, teasing — and I was shocked to see what a fantastic comedy duo they make. Ahn Jae-hong is a favorite of mine and next to Kim Yoo-jung he’s able to do what he does best: effortlessly shift from comic nerd to sweet-faced potential boyfriend in one simple change of expression. Kim Yoo-jung, too, is full of hilarity as she delivers ridiculous lines with straight-faced cuteness.
Needless to say, I wanted much more of this interaction. But all that goes out the window when Min-ah steps into a newly delivered machine and comes out a faceless chicken nugget, indecipherable from the other nuggets they’re eating for lunch. This is when the antics turn up to high volume and our story becomes a fantastical mystery about how to change Min-ah back into the lovable crush we’ve just met — before she gets eaten by a rando or desiccated to nothing from lack of a marinade.
When Sun-man returns to find Baek-joong cradling a lonely nugget that he’s calling Min-ah, it takes little to convince him that his daughter is indeed a chicken snack. From there, it’s a mad race against time (and logic) as father and intern try to figure out where this mysterious machine was delivered from, who made it, how it works, and why it’s going around turning pretty girls into nuggets when it’s not even plugged in. While the dialogue is consistently funny between our novice buddy detectives, the exaggerated emotion began to test my patience by Episode 2, where it’s ramped up as the investigation continues.
After the setup, the story is structured like a quest where Sun-man and Baek-joong gather clues (is “nuggets of information” too much?) and we follow along as the situations get sillier. They move from trying to identify the person who delivered the machine (a coarse-mouthed courier from a competing chicken restaurant) to learning about the prize-winning scientist who designed it — only to discover that the scientist has gone missing too. And the mystery thickens.
In the interim, Min-ah has gotten mixed up with the other chicken nuggets at the lunch table and neither her father nor her admirer can pick her out of a dakgangjeong lineup. And so, instead of following the thread of the missing mechanical engineer, our unlikely unit detours to look for a chicken tasting prophet that can tell Min-ah from the rest. In the shenanigans that ensue, the box of nuggets is flipped in the air, falls to the ground, and gets co-mingled with even more chicken treats at a nearby table.
Sun-man and Baek-joong crawl around to collect what’s been dropped, just as a little girl takes a chomp out of one of their nuggets. Cue emotional Armageddon.
As our single father and his hapless employee writhe around on the ground screaming like they’re being deep fried in oil, a woman we haven’t yet met calls them back to order by asserting that the bitten nugget is not Min-ah. A sudden calm washes over the scene and it will be up to the next episode to tell us who this woman is and how she knows.
Like I said, it’s weird. But the weirdness could work to its advantage if it was consistently funny. There’s a bit of a problem with pacing here where the gags are drawn out too long and the script relies too much on the absurdity of the situations themselves to keep us rolling. It doesn’t always work. For example, the story of the scientist who developed the machine dragged on, feeling like filler to ensure the particular plot segment could max out the thirty minutes needed for an episode.
Directed and adapted for the screen by filmmaker Lee Byung-heon (of Dream and Twenty fame, among others), pacing is a perpetual grievance I have with his films. He leans on long visual sequences that run out their narrative interest and then rely on compelling camerawork to keep them going. Since Chicken Nugget is a series, I’m seeing shorter, repeated instances of this within the episodes already, which for me adds deserts of time between the really fascinating and funny parts.
That being said, there’s a lot to love here in terms of the visuals. The cartoonish cinematography, the symmetrical shots, and the scant set design put us right into the surrealist world of a webtoon, making the context somehow believable, even as we’re asked to suspend our disbelief.
While I won’t be continuing with this one, I am tempted to skip to the end to see how it concludes. I’m invested enough to want to know how they bring Min-ah back — but mostly (assuming they succeed), I want to know if Baek-joong gets the girl. Will life as a chicken nugget make Min-ah all the more body conscious? (I mean, she’s just lived as a deep-fried piece of meat.) Or will she decide that a kind heart and a gumshoe intellect matter more than toned arms when you find yourself in one of life’s sticky-sauce situations?