Heartless City
무정도시 / Cruel City
(May – July 2013)


who’s in it
Jung KyungHo (Smile You, Time Between Dog and Wolf)
Nam GyuRi (49 Days, Life is Beautiful)
Kim YooMi (Enjoy Life, Country Princess)
Lee JaeYoon (Ghost, Just Like Today)
Yoon HyunMin (Still You, More Charming By the Day)
Choi MooSung (I Live in Cheongdam-dong)
Son Chang Min (Horse Doctor, Man of Honor)
Go Na Eun (Assorted Gems) 

what’s it about 
For a show like this one, built on violence, suspense, and misdirection, any summary becomes too much summary because even a half morsel of information ends up giving everything away.

The bones of this drama, however, is simply about a police task force created for the sole purpose of bringing down a shifty criminal network that has been flooding massive amounts of soul-sucking drugs into Seoul. That is the spine of it, but there is so much more to the tale than the basic promise of cops going after drug dealers. There is blood, heart, brains, and a whole heaping mess of beautifully filmed gore, gristle, muscle…basically it’s a cinematically riveting organic explosion about the darker side of human nature as told from the point of view of a criminal underworld and a legal system that behaves no different than the people it chases. It is a modern story with old themes, ones as old as Rome, about the redemption of devils and the corruption of angels.


Lee JaeYoon plays the detective chasing and Jung KyungHo plays the man being chased. Nam GyuRi plays the innocent caught between two worlds. That’s all you are allowed to know until you watch it, the show will reveal the rest. That’s all you should want to know if you have any interest in watching this one. Trust me on this, Heartless is not the show you should indulge your need for spoilers, as part of its hypnotic quality is about going in blindfolded and tied, being tossed completely innocent into this stylish romance with the dark side. 

commitment 
20 episodes

network
JTBC

director
Lee JungHyo

screenwriter
Yoo SungYeol

music
Nam HyeSung
Amazing soulful music in this one, and perfectly constructed for the show. There were so many layers that it fit so many aspects and themes. Hints of jazz and blues, sometimes even carnie, and all parts emotional.

photography
Choi YoonMan
The look of this one was all vintage style, atmospheric, and a personality of its own. Practically black and white…without actually being filmed in black and white.

first impressions
What’s the date and time? I may have to notarize this moment.

It is possible that I have just begun watching the hands-down coolest, sexiest, most awe-smacking, well-produced drama served up to a kdrama audience in recent memory. Can a person tell they are living a momentous historical moment even before that moment passes? Absolutely I’m going overboard, but that’s how much amazement I have for this one, and how impressed I am by the first few episodes.

Not all the main characters have been introduced yet, in fact, a few only catch minutes of airtime. The ones we do meet have little direct interplay with the wider net of players as yet. They exist in their own corners of Seoul. Still, we already know that they are all insidiously interconnected, whether by circumstance or by people. The showdown we all know is coming already feels epic. We feel it looming ahead like the iceberg that must have seen the bloated tanker Titanic approaching. We know some of these characters only by their aliases, but what will happen when we know their true names and their true faces? How will they be revealed when their costumes are stripped away and the truth of the person inside is laid bare?


This world is a winding clock, and the players in it the gears grinding along…and it is not a natural world in which they exist, not a world built for surviving.

And as spectators, we all hold our breaths knowing that someone or something—pure and hot—is about to come along with a hammer and smash its constant simple logic to smithereens, offering us a glimpse into the chaos and complexity behind the movement of lives. 
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