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As informal viewers and devoted binge-watchers alike know, there’s merely an excessive amount of TV nowadays—each when it comes to the variety of exhibits, and the size of their copious installments. On the heels of Stranger Issues’ bloated fourth season, that overabundance is now additionally seen by way of Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space, a spin-off of Álex Pina’s hit Spanish crime collection whose six Season 1 episodes all clock in at over an hour, and three of which prime a whopping seventy minutes. As is so usually the case with fashionable small-screen affairs, extra is certainly not higher, with an absence of concision resulting in wheel-spinning detours and pointless subplots. Extra troubling for director Kim Hong-sun’s thriller, nonetheless, is identical factor that plagues Pina’s fashionable authentic: a surplus of cheesiness.
Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space units its motion in a 2026 during which North and South Korea have put apart their variations and agreed to unify. Step one in that course of is the creation of a mutual financial area the place they will come collectively financially and culturally, replete with a brand new shared foreign money. The epicenter of this space is the Unified Korea Mint, the place that cash is being printed, and it’s additionally the goal of the Professor (Yoo Ji-tae), a felony mastermind with a plan to interrupt into the closely fortified constructing and stroll away with 4 trillion gained. To do that, he assembles a motley crew whose members every boast a specialised ability match for this operation. When the time comes to drag off the heist, they don matching crimson jumpsuits and smiley-face masks like they had been the cousins of the contestants on Squid Sport and take the Mint’s staff hostage whereas finishing up their illicit enterprise.
In different phrases, Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space is like its Spanish counterpart in addition to innumerable different robbery-related fictions. There’s no actual twist to those proceedings that differentiate it from related efforts, which locations the storytelling burden on Ryu Yong-jae, Kim Hwan-chae, and Choe Sung-jun’s scripts. These instantly deal with dapper forty-something genius Professor and his recruits, all of whom assume foreign-city nicknames as a way of concealing their identities from one another, their hostages, and the police. Tokyo (Jeon Jong-seo) is a North Korean expat who was saved from a lifetime of degradation by the Professor, to whom she’s intensely loyal. Berlin (Park Hae-soo) is a ruthless labor-camp survivor who thinks instilling concern is the perfect technique of exerting management. Nairobi (Jang Yoon-ju) is a cagey counterfeiter and con lady. Rio (Lee Hyun-woo) is a brash hacker. Moscow (Lee Gained-jong) is a former miner and demolitions knowledgeable. His son Denver (Kim Ji-hoon) is a dim-witted avenue fighter. And Helsinki (Kim Ji-hun) and Oslo (Lee Kyu-ho) are the Professor’s thuggish muscle.
Although there’s speak concerning the precariousness of the 2 nations’ alliance, and the way unification has widened the hole between the haves and the have-nots, the Professor’s motive for wanting to interrupt into the Mint is left obscure, the higher to avoid wasting revelations for a possible second season. What’s much less indirect is that the Professor doesn’t need anybody damage or killed in the course of the heist, each as a result of he’s a very good man (deep down) and since he finally means to make use of public opinion to his benefit. Unsurprisingly, that’s simpler mentioned than completed, since there are 50-odd hostages to be wrangled contained in the Mint, led by the ability’s director Cho Younger-min (Park Myung-hoon), who has a behavior of inflicting bother for everybody, starting along with his oft-mistreated mistress Yoon Mi-seon (Lee Joo-bin). Nonetheless, there’s scant pressure on the subject of these doubtlessly explosive dynamics, since Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space shortly lets on that it doesn’t have the heart to truly kill any of its characters.
By tipping its hand concerning the hazard everyone seems to be in, the collection renders itself a low-stakes (if intricately designed) cat-and-mouse recreation, highlighted by the Professor’s back-and-forths with Seon Woo-jin (Misplaced’s Kim Yun-jin), the negotiator assigned to run the Nationwide Police Company’s responding activity power. In an early twist, it’s revealed that the Professor has already struck up a romantic relationship with Woo-jin (who doesn’t know her beau is the Professor)—one in every of some ways during which he endeavors to realize intel on his adversaries and keep one step forward of seize. Whereas that might not be fully believable, it’s a growth that no less than speaks to the narrative’s fixation on divisions, a lot of which—comparable to Woo-jin’s friction together with her extra gung-ho second-in-command, Captain Cha Moo-hyuk (Kim Sung-oh)—are rooted within the still-raw emotions felt by North and South Koreans for one another and their democratic/authoritarian methods of life.
“Nonetheless, there’s scant pressure on the subject of these doubtlessly explosive dynamics, since ‘Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space’ shortly lets on that it doesn’t have the heart to truly kill any of its characters.”
These hostilities are exploited by the Professor and Berlin to keep up order and obtain their ends, however Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space solely superficially cares about politics; its predominant curiosity is fast-paced suspense and romance. Director Kim Hong-sun indulges within the type of shiny, showy compositions (filled with posing characters), whiplash-inducing camerawork and insistent scoring that remembers early-2000s American cinema, when each different blockbuster director was desperately attempting to ape Michael Bay. This type definitely retains issues from dragging, but it will probably’t make up for a group of paper-thin protagonists. Whether or not they’re preaching loyalty and levelheadedness, disobeying orders in mutinous vogue, placing their very own wishes and security over that of their compatriots, or falling in love, the present’s characters undergo their motions like inventory figures modeled after one million genre-fiction ancestors.
Cash Heist: Korea – Joint Financial Space turns into so busy with its numerous interpersonal dilemmas that the execution of the particular heist quickly falls by the wayside; for almost all of its six distended installments, nobody even talks concerning the very cash that’s the aim of this whole enterprise. That may operate as its personal intelligent twist if it appeared purposeful, however when coupled with a handful of obvious plot holes, it largely seems like a byproduct of the collection’ shallowness. Intent on delivering flashy thrills, it comes throughout because the Netflix equal of a trivial paperback seashore learn, albeit one unreasonably—and unsustainably—expanded to Battle and Peace-size episodic dimensions.
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