Good potential marred by poor scripting and character development

WARNING: This review does contain a fair amount of spoilers, and is meant for people who have watched the drama and are here to commiserate.

First off, Vincenzo is not a bad drama. It is well produced, entertaining and the cast is sufficiently charismatic enough to make one feel invested. But it always feels like you’re waiting for that Great Plot Moment to happen, rather than actually getting said Great Plot Moment.

Make no mistake, this is not for lack of trying on the scriptwriter’s part. In fact, often it feels as though the drama is trying to serve up an entire buffet of iconic screen moments - a la romantic sit ups from Secret Garden that people will reference for years to come - rather than to tell an actual story. The basic bones of the plot has the potential to go quite deep, and being constantly offered this sort of shallow entertainment instead of something more substantial left the bad taste of dissatisfaction after every episode.

To begin with, we had an infallible hero pitted against a one-dimensional villain.

Vincenzo is a Mary-Sue. His plans never fail. He knows everyone who is anyone. Everybody loves him (except of course, the baddies). He always manages to light his iconic lighter on the first attempt. He also gets hit by a truck and makes a complete recovery, without so much as needing physiotherapy or even recovery time after waking up. He escapes an entire intelligence organisation (make that two intelligence organisations) continuously throughout the show, AND to top if off, he kills off side characters in the same offhand way as the villains but never ever faces any kind of consequence for it. Clearly, god's favour - that being the scriptwriter - rests on him.

On the other hand, poor Tacyeon received no such blessings. Jang Joon Woo is portrayed as an absolute villain. He is violent, self-serving and psychotic. He has no redeeming qualities, no deep motivations for his actions, no sad backstory to humanise him. He is simply there to be the villain. Even his cute puppy love for Hong Cha Young is ephemeral, serving no plot purpose except possibly comedy and 2PM fan service. It appears that Chaka-nim did not love him enough to make him an actual person. Chaka-nim used him simply to drive the plot forward and give the audience a 100% pure unadulterated evil character to hate.

Next, the themes of the drama were not properly developed.

With the hero and the villain being such polar opposites, there is no meaningful way to explore the theme of good and evil — a theme one would fully expect from a show such as this. Both Vincenzo and Jang Joon Woo are bad guys, so what makes us root for one over the other? What, exactly, is good and what is evil? These are the thoughts that the drama should have provoked in the audience. More deliberate side-by-side lining up of these two characters, muddying up the lines between them would have made for a more compelling story. Yes the drama does frequently drop reminders that Vincenzo is no angel, but still expects us to love and adore him all the same, as shown by the ensemble cast.

Similarly, so much more could have been done with Hong Cha Young. Her motivations and character development in the drama are vague, to say the least. She has no clear growth arc. She initially appears motivated by revenge, but her father’s death is quickly forgotten once it has served its purpose of bringing her and Vincenzo together. Does she change as the story progresses? Does she become more like those she is trying to destroy? Does she grow into fully inheriting her father’s legacy as the “Last Straw”? We don’t know because, like Jang Joon Woo, she is there merely to serve the plot and the romance. It is such a waste because she is perfectly positioned to explore how a person might become evil, sort of like a possible origin story suggesting how the male leads might have ended up being who they are. She would also have been a much more suitable adversary to Choi Myung Hee, driven as she is by personal revenge, as well as possibly being the younger version of Choi Myung Hee had the drama made use of that potential direction. Which, as with so many other opportunities, it didn’t.

Finally, a note about the drama’s presentation of violence.

Watching Vincenzo, I felt uncomfortable with the way the drama handled violence and gangsterism. It was not Jang Joon Woo’s rampage scenes that bothered me, even though those were graphic. Those were clearly portrayed as wrong and undesirable. It was the way the drama permitted its heroic couple to casually kill off side characters with no reprimand or consequence. Vincenzo and Hong Cha Young engage in their own share of violence, either directly or indirectly, killing off those they wish to seek vengeance on, who are in their way, or who have outlived their usefulness, but their position as heroes is never once questioned. They continue to enjoy the adulation of all the ‘good people’ in the drama and, by extension, that of the audience too. I understand that this is a show about pitting a lesser evil against a greater evil, and the writers wanted to highlight the morally ambiguous aspect of Vincenzo, but they definitely have double standards for Vincenzo and Jang Joon Woo’s equally criminal, and equally selfishly motivated acts, presenting Jang Joon Woo’s crimes as abominable while excusing Vincenzo’s deeds. This, more so than the actual violence itself, makes me feel that the drama fully deserves its M18 rating on Netflix.

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