Will she return home?
A rich businesswoman from South Korea is stranded in North Korea, and her ticket home is a boring but good-hearted North Korean soldier with irritating red lipstick. Yes, the South Koreans have turned real North Korean soldiers into flower boys! But not all of her family members want her home, and there’s another man in North Korea from her past who can make her return difficult. Additionally, there’s another woman who is supposed to marry the soldier she falls in love with, and she’s an ice queen with a cool “I don’t give a damn” vibe. Furthermore, there’s a corrupt North Korean soldier who wants to kill her, so the only one who can protect her is the boring North Korean soldier. The corrupt soldier also hates this good-hearted soldier. Drama!
“Crash Landing on You” consists of 16 long episodes. This series was a huge success, and many people loved it. But why is that, and are they right?
I disliked the series. I was hoping to watch a TV series that could bring me back to a classic movie like “Welcome to Dongmakgol.” It seemed possible in the first episodes, but the resemblance ends there.
The problem with this romantic comedy-drama is the script, which is generic and uninspired. I have watched a lot of South Korean melodramas, and this series feels like a bad, long movie with a poor and useless ending. The ending stinks, and they should have changed it so that it would be unforgettable, given how silly and unlikeable the script and characters are. The ending I wanted and found perfect is never realized here.
Speaking of unlikeable, the protagonist, a rich woman, has a family that mostly hates her and everything she stands for. The family members are a group of cartoon characters with no depth. The only character I found interesting was the mother and her guilt over what she did to her daughter when the daughter was young. The other family characters are a joke! The evil brother and his wife are a joke! They are just evil, there’s nothing more to them than that.
Then we have the irritating soldier friends of the soldier who falls in love with the South Korean woman, who is supposed to charm you and melt your frozen heart. They look like a group of freaks, especially the man with huge lips who has smeared on red lipstick. It’s disgusting to follow soldiers who are supposed to be real men wearing red lipstick. Yes, I’m going to mention red lipstick in every review of Korean series when so-called “not real men” have smeared red lipstick on their dry lips. Dry lips mean they are real men and not women! Give me those dry, Korean lips every day instead of that feminine crap!
Then we have the actors. The best of them is, of course, Son Ye-jin. She is always good; she can cry naturally, realistically showing her emotions, and she has a lot of charisma and charm. But the same cannot be said about the man she married after the series in real life, Hyun Bin. He is a tall man, and I have seen him in several movies, but I can barely remember anything about him, and I’m sort of glad about that. His portrayal of a North Korean soldier is awful. He has no charm, and his acting is like watching a wooden plank driving in first gear without breaking a sweat. I don’t care that his character is written this way because it’s just lazy acting. It’s like he’s sleepwalking. I don’t buy that the woman would fall in love with this wooden plank of a character. And I found his voice disgusting. He sounds like a not-so-smart cousin of Forrest Gump. Stupid idiot! Remove that potato from your throat! You sound like an unsexy Danish man!
And then we have another problem with these two: the lack of chemistry. There’s not much chemistry between them at all because of the wooden plank that can’t act. Do you hear me, Hyun Bin? After I watched the first episode, I was planning not to watch further episodes because of the dead chemistry between the two lovers. But after a month, I decided to give “Crash Landing on You” a second chance, and I found the first episode to be sort of fun, especially when the stupid woman runs through a minefield, which is so stupid. But the most important element in a romantic comedy-drama is missing here, which is the chemistry between the two lovers. The spark isn’t there.
The villain in the series is also a cartoon character. The actor playing him is excellent, and I hated his face and voice. But he does his job well, and then something happens, and he turns into that villain who won’t die, with a stupid plan that you know won’t work. So in the end, he also becomes an irritating character that you can’t get rid of because of the bad scriptwriting. He doesn’t understand that his job is done, so he has to show up a couple of more times which makes him look like a clown and not the cool villain he was in the first half of the series.
So there are a lot of problems with this series. Don’t buy the hype. This is not a good romantic comedy-drama series. The script is, for the most part, trash, and the characters are a group of poorly written cartoon characters who don’t feel human at all, except for the woman from South Korea. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have given up on the series a long time ago.
The reason “Crash Landing on You” became such a success must be because of teenage girls and their poor taste in TV series. The script is so bad, and I haven’t even mentioned the disaster that we call the ending. The ending of this series is so wasted, and I don’t care about the logic behind it because it still stinks. They should have come up with another idea so that the ending was memorable. “Crash Landing on You” has one of the worst and laziest endings I have ever encountered in a TV series. It never resolves much, and I felt sad for one of the characters.