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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Three Days" Episode 10

The conclusion at corporate headquarters is about everything that can be reasonably expected. It says quite a bit about the way characters in this drama plan events that defeat keeps popping up in moments of practically absolute strength. "Three Days" takes place in a world where bravado and confidence are not great advantages. Anytime somebody takes a moment to be smug the weaker party is able to take advantage of that foolishness to shift the dynamics again.

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The drama is able to do a decent job the closer it hews to standard action tropes. The more special twists remain problematic. We get the complete explanation here for Cha-yeong's motivation. There is, in fact, so much detail regarding Cha-yeong's activities that the revelations quickly become monotonous. There hasn't been enough exposition of Cha-yeong up until this point to justify outing her character so completely. As a result much of this episode comes off as ham-handed. It's difficult to see this as a reasonable character progression when up until now there was almost no exploration of her character at all.

The drama also has problems managing which character is supposed to know what at any given time. I get how people can be paranoid yet still be caught off-guard. It's much more difficult to reconcile them managing to appear at exactly the right time to do exactly what they need to do in exactly the right way so consistently. It's one thing to suspect someone of being a spy- it's quite another to predict their movements so perfectly that a flawless capture is pulled off.

Even though a great many events happen this episode, the reversals come up so suddenly that it's difficult to make much sense of what happens. The opening sequence works because it builds well off of the cliffhanger. This cliffhanger, by contrast, sets up a mystery not of character reaction but character motivation. And this kind of puzzle simply doesn't make sense with characters this heavily developed. We should know who these people are by now- it's difficult to imagine past clues that could have reasonably contextualized this.

A lot of this is just bad timing, though. After what happened with Chae-yeong, building up a similar plot hook with another member of the main cast comes off as fairly lazy. "Three Days" has become difficult to predict, not because the drama is exciting and filled with incredible tension, but because I'm barely sure what's even happening anymore. I long for a fistfight- something simple and elegant enough that it can be easily understood.

Review by William Schwartz

"Three Days" is directed by Sin Kyeong-soo, written by Kim Eun-hee-I and features Park Yoo-chun, Son Hyun-joo, Park Ha-sun, So Yi-hyun, Yoon Je-moon, Choi Won-young and Jang Hyun-sung.

 

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