This one has it all: past lives, childhood friend that’s in love with the female lead, vengeful mother, CEO, childhood connection for the leads. If you’re ready full a story jam packed with every Kdrama cliché out there, strap in you’re in for a ride!
Hyeon Ju ( Hwang Jung Eum) is a successful producer, who after a near death experience as a child swears she will never get married. The reason? During her near-death experience, she had visions of all of her past lives, where she was married to the same guy, she never saw his face in her visions, each time their marriage and lives ended in tragedy. During her “marriage” to herself she makes it official she will remain single forever. Enter Ji Woo (Yoon Hyun Min), a successful CEO who is obsessed with Hyeon Ju to the point of sabotaging her career to keep her close to him, so he can watch over her. The reason for this obsession? You guessed it! He also remembers his past lives and she’s the one. He’s determined to make things right this time around. But what happens when a person from their past lives shows up and will do anything to keep them apart? Will history repeat itself? Or will they finally have their happily ever after?
The series starts out very promising and the script is very clever and funny. There is a scene at the beginning where the two male leads ( Seo Ji Hoon and Yoon Hyun Min) are stuck inside of a tent together and are struggling to get the zipper of the tent loose so they can escape, however what we see on the screen is a silhouette of the two and a children’s field trip watching on confused asking their teacher “what are those two doing in there?”. The scene was pure gold and will have you laughing like crazy!
If I could say something positive about this one, Seo Ji Hoon shined. He is a rising star in the Kdrama world, and it was a pleasure to watch him play the childhood friend who is in love with the female lead. He is great at displaying emotion without using words, and just using his body language. On look at his stance or eyes, and you can feel the emotion. I would have liked to see his character develop more with the story.
Her whiney friends are introduced early on and their side stories are just as boring as they sound. I found myself doing something I never do, fast forwarded through them to get to the main story. However, even the story lost its magic at the halfway point. I blame the script and the acting. The biggest problem with this story was they built up such an exciting plot and then just let it fizzle out. There were moments where you were screaming at the tv, and then confused at the same time.
The acting disappointed me on this one. Nothing is worse to me then when a male lead is giving it is all in the emotional scenes but is getting NOTHING in return from the female lead. I never thought I would crave PSH and a “fish kiss” after watching HJE and her “board kiss”. There were moments where the script had some very cheeky sexual undertones, and she delivers the scene with the passion of a wooden 2x4. This was the first time in a while when I truly saw the male and female lead “acting” Infront of me instead of living the moment of the scene. Truly disappointing since I’ve seen them both pull off great roles in separate projects. They had zero chemistry on screen, and you could feel it.