Advertisement
Advertisement
Korean drama reviews
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Jung Woo in a still from A Model Family, which mines family drama and gangster tropes but is filled with weak characters you’ll fail to care for. Photo: Narda/Netflix

Review | Netflix K-drama review: A Model Family – Breaking Bad this isn’t; crime drama starring Jung Woo merely serves up reheated leftovers

  • Don’t expect Breaking Bad levels of thrills in A Model Family – the crime drama mines familiar tropes but is filled with weak characters you’ll fail to care for
  • The show’s slick but unremarkable cinematography cannot save the K-drama, which has a curiously incongruous soundtrack and sloppy editing

1.5/5 stars

A Model Family, Netflix’s latest Korean original offering, dovetails two of the country’s most popular genres, the family melodrama and the gangster saga.

The tears of the former meld with the blood of the latter in a story that revolves around a bag of money and the succession of bad decisions it inspires.

The title is, of course, a misnomer; the family in question is about as functional as a car with no wheels – a comparison that, sadly, also fits as a description for the series as a whole, as the wheels come off within a few episodes.

Jung Woo (Mad for Each Other) stars as the hapless Park Dong-ha, an associate professor of literature with a lot of problems.

His wife Kang Eun-joo (Yoon Jin-seo) wants a divorce, his bratty teenage daughter Yeon-woo (Shin Eun-soo) hates his guts and his angelic son Hyun-woo (Seok Min-gi) is in need of a heart transplant.

For a brief moment, Dong-ha’s problems appear to be solved when a big bag of cash falls into his lap. Actually, it rolls into his back as a small van bumps into him while he’s stopped in the middle of a dusty country road.

The car has two passengers, both very dead, and the aforementioned cash strewn over the back seat.

Dong-ha’s circumstances quickly suppress any pangs of conscience he may have, as he decides to take the money and bury the bodies in his backyard while his family are staying with his in-laws.

7 new Korean drama series to look out for in August 2022

Then his real problems begin. Although he tries to cover his tracks, it takes no time at all for both a vicious gang and the detectives pursuing them to begin circling around him.

Dong-ha and his family live in a house in a small community of modern homes built into the side of a lonely hill at a remove from Seoul, the South Korean capital. This is a novel location for a middle-class Korean family that would typically be living in a flat.

As things get worse for Dong-ha and he has nightmares about his immediate future, he can imagine the home he is trying to protect going up in flames.

Park Hee-soon in a still from A Model Family.

Somehow, the small enclave the family lives in has enough vacancies for gangster Ma Kwang-chul (Park Hee-soon) and his entourage of muscle, and detective Kang Joo-hyun (Park Ji-yeon) and her partner, to move in right across from Dong-ha.

Kwang-chul is a ruthless and fearsome mobster who has been charged by his blood brother with retrieving the money Dong-ha swiped, part of a drug deal, and finding the two deliverymen who are now buried in his yard.

Kwang-chul is in a similar predicament to Dong-ha. His family is the gang he belongs to, and as an orphan it is the only one he has ever known. But times have changed and this family is also falling apart, which partly fuels the desperation of their search.

Jung Woo in a still from A Model Family.

Retrieving the money is an existential crisis for them. If they fail to deliver, the shadowy criminals above them are not likely to show any mercy.

A Model Family asks: what would you be willing to do for your family? Naturally, the answer is a lot, but in Dong-ha’s case his troubles are so self-inflicted and familiar that it is hard to care. Even more than that, he fails as a character.

The story takes a turn early on, when he has to ensconce himself deeper in the world of crime to protect his family, but this is no Breaking Bad.

Dong-ha carries around books that hint at his transformation, like Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but there is no meat to it. Over 10 episodes, Dong-ha never becomes anything more or less than a snivelling coward. By comparison, Breaking Bad’s Walter White assumes the Heisenberg nickname in six.

Yoon Jin-seo in a still from A Model Family. Photo: Narda/Netflix
Just as empty a character, if not more so, is Kwang-chul. No one looks as comfortable in a gangster suit as Park Hee-soon, who has played husky-voiced mobsters in many a film and series, including My Name last year.

But no amount of violence, posturing and brooding can mask the fact that his character is a wafer-thin creation with weak motivations and a shoddy story arc.

More clear in her motivations, but alas not for the better, is the tedious Joo-hyun, a detective who is more moody than hard-boiled, and whose investigative skills are more Pink Panther than Sherlock Holmes.

It is no wonder the characters do not really come into focus, since they are stuck in a show that does not seem to know what it wants to be.

It mines the familiar tropes of melodrama and crime drama, with heart transplants and estranged relatives sharing screen time with occasional dashes of gratuitous sex and violence, but there is not a single original moment in the whole affair.

Jung Woo in a still from A Model Family.

Technically, A Model Family features slick but unremarkable cinematography, a curiously incongruous soundtrack and sloppy editing, which relies heavily on flashback but confusingly switches between black and white and colour.

After barrelling through an exasperating climax, the show ends with a feeble set-up for a second season that is never likely to materialise.

A Model Family is streaming on Netflix.

Post