[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" Episode 2

It turns out there is one story element here that's good for some laughs- Cheo Yeong's tendency to resort to police brutality at the slightest excuse. This bothered me in the first episode, given there's almost no indication from the other characters that Cheo Yeong's is any way extreme. But if the drama doesn't want to address this point, fine, I can deal with that. After all, if Cheo Yeong's just looking for excuses to get into fights, that means we get rad action sequences.

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And music too. Whoever's composing this stuff must be having a pretty fun time of it, coordinating all these strength riffs with punches. It really does a lot to set up the excitement factor when even the sound is itching for a fight. And the choreography delivers too. I'm not sure where Cheo Yeong learned to fight entire armies of criminal hooligans at once, but then it doesn't really matter does it?

Elsewhere, as far as the detective storyline goes, we actually get a fairly effective hook coupled with a clear resolution. And here I was just thinking that was product placement, when in reality it was a clue! Not even a terribly vague one, really. It's too bad Cheo Yeong is more of a street fighter than an actual detective. Seems kind of unseemly to leave all the actual investigative work to a teenage girl.

But even this has its high points in the greater context of the narrative. It's amusing to see the standard tropes regarding helpless female leads get mucked around a bit by gauging their actual level of competence. Na-yeong is not an actual detective, so thrust into dangerous situations, it makes sense that she screws up and fumbles situations. Somebody needs to give her a talking to about the need of preserving evidence, given that ghosts can't testify.

In terms of greater logic there are lots of problems here. It's a good thing Cheo Yeong is a one man army, given that hospitals have no security and the larger police department is rather pokey about dealing with serious sounding problems about hijacking. Still, we can easily take these particular story movements as just being part of the territory regarding this kind of action drama. "Cheo Yeong: The Paranormal Detective" can actually be pretty engaging when it focuses on police action rather than characterization and deliberation. Let's hope the drama's able to stay narrowed in on this particular direction.

Review by William Schwartz

"Cheo Yong: The Paranormal Detective" is directed by Lim Chan-ik, written by Hong Seung-hyeon and features Oh Ji-ho, Oh Ji-eun and Jun Hyo-seong.