Mission Run (2022)

Pretty good drama, but suffers from having too many protagonists

Watched up to episode 22 so thought I would share my thoughts. This is one of those ICAC kinda dramas, and it has the Youku signature gritty gray dark style we’ve come to expect from their dramas these days. It is pretty good and starts with the collapse of a building during an ICAC investigation that has 5 childhood friends get caught up in a lot of trauma and injury. Fast forward to present time and they have all grown up and have their own paths that all deal back together due to the collapsed building of the past. It is all written pretty well and starts off slow, but once the bad guys start doing their stuff a few episodes in is where it starts to get really good. The only thing holding this drama back are that there are too many protagonists in it and they do not bounce off each other effectively as foils for the other characters, instead we have Vincent Wong, Bosco Wong and Ron Ng all acting very serious and all shown to have contemplative moments, but they are very samey. There isn’t an upbeat member of their crew at all, so it just gets very depressing, especially when they are onscreen at the same time with Nancy Wu and Mandy Wong. Sisley Choi is the only upbeat person in the drama but she is not part of the main crew, and it seems Sisley has been typecast into these roles so you can see it coming a mile away. The true pull of the drama comes from the bad guys played by Ben Wong, and Derek Kwok, two complete and utter bastards that would do shady things for money. If it weren’t for them, this drama would be a 5 or 6, they pull it up to a 7

Update: I just completed watching the entire series and holy moley, I have to pull the score down to a 5 because the ending was so abrupt and ridiculous it gave me whiplash 3 times. We spend most of it watching Nancy Wu’s character trying to take down Ben Wong but it all fails, so literally in one episode near the end she basically goes “f*** it” and kidnaps Ben’s wife and kid and forces him to a confrontation and admit his crimes to a secret livestream. Like all the plans failed, but a last ditch unplanned attempt in one episode out of 27 suddenly works? That is some lazy writing and it annoyed me to no end.

And to top it off, I forgot to mention in my earlier post that that many of the scenes are dubbed over, with the native cantonese speakers having to dub over their lines again. This is quite typical with many Youku productions, but the problem here is that the dub does not provide good lip syncing at all is it looks very out of place. Just get a better boom mic, please!

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