[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Full Sun" Episode 8

At this point even the characters don't actually care about the elaborate con artist scheme anymore. I'm kind of astonished at the extent to which everyone in this drama is such a romantic busybody. Given the circumstances of the situation it's not exactly inconceivable that Se-ro and Yeong-won would want to hook up. But no, a good con artist is supposed to avoid emotional attachments. Also Yeong-won isn't allowed to be happy.

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Normally the phrase "isn't allowed to be happy" refers to a narrative conspiring to create tragedy in a person's life for no good reason. But in this case it really is just a matter of characterization. Yeong-won's family isn't satisfied with just having her out of the way so she can't interfere in whatever their dumb plans are, no. She has to actively be miserable to prove...something. I kind of doubt they even know, honestly. These people seem to have decided that if they don't get to be happy, no one else does either. Never mind the fact that these emotional wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted..

In terms of weird action, we have multiple scenes this time depicting people going up and down giant spirals. I'm not sure what the point of the scenes is exactly, but they're so deliberately constructed it's kind of difficult to ignore them. There's something kind of goofy about a scene that pretty much amounts to a slow car chase, as in, I'm not even sure what anyone's trying to accomplish there, but hey, it's charming. Not everything can be a big fistfight.

Nor should it, by the way. "The Full Sun" has much better balance lately, doing a good job transitioning between emotionally thick romantic scenes, light tense action, and then the bad guys decide, forget it, we're just going to doing something blatantly violent and illegal because we're evil. I really do need to note, the extreme measures these people will take to make Yeong-won suffer come off as especially comical considering these people are completely incapable of catching on to the con artist's scheme.

Perhaps that's what this drama is supposed to be about- how people, even in their most paranoid moments, can completely fail to miss the folks who are actually out to get them. Make that especially in their most paranoid moments actually. I'm increasingly getting the sense that if Se-ro wasn't distracting them with his romantic antics, the bad guys would have gotten a clue by now. At this rate the plan's going to succeed on the strength of sheer inertia.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Full Sun" is directed by Bae Kyeong-soo, Kim Jung-hyun-III, written by Heo Seong-hye and features Yoon Kye-sang, Han Ji-hye and Cho Jin-woong.