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That Man Oh Soo korean drama review
Completed
That Man Oh Soo
0 people found this review helpful
by Apollo37
Jul 25, 2022
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 8.0
Story 8.5
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 7.0
This review may contain spoilers

All Credits for this Review goes to " Meicchi's Blog "

This is the original source for this Review.
https://meicchisblog.ninja/2019/06/17/that-man-oh-soo/

* Again All the credits goes to
" Meicchi's Blog " -- ---------> https://meicchisblog.ninja/

I just wanted to Clear the facts about this Drama ,

Here is the review from Meicchi's Blog...

The thing I like best about having an extended drama-to-watch list is that I always have something to look forward to. Whenever I start a new drama, I always feel the thrill of starting something I’ve been looking forward to, something that’s been on my list for a long time and I finally get to watch it.
That was the same for this one. I’m not sure where I heard or read about it, but it probably looked cute and that’s why it went on the list.
The only thing I remembered was that it was about a cafe or something with coffee. I always like to be surprised by series.

So, the English title of this drama is ‘Evergreen’, but the literal translation of the Korean title is ‘That Man Oh Soo’.
The story is about a young man named Oh Soo (played by Lee Jong Hyun), who doesn’t believe in love. He’s a promising IT engineer who specializes in artificial intelligence. The reason he doesn’t believe in love is because of a magic tree that’s in possession of his family. In the courtyard of his house is a big tree with all sorts of colorful flowers that give off certain pollen. Oh Soo’s family is cursed with the ability to see the colors of these pollen – and also the color of people’s auras. Also in possession of his family is a cafe. When customers come to the cafe, Oh Soo can see their auras and based on that determines what kind of pollen he can add to their coffee.
One time, he serves coffee with the love pollen to a couple from which the guy seemingly is about to propose. Instead, to everyone’s astonishment, after drinking the coffee he suddenly breaks up with the girl and leaves her behind at the cafe. This unfortunate girl is Seo Yoo Ri (played by Kim So Eun). She had been dating this guy for three years, and this was the day he’d sworn he would propose. Yoo Ri is also a police officer.
After that, Oh Soo and Yoo Ri meet several times, first under not such great circumstances, but gradually they grow closer. Oh Soo finally discovers what love feels like and eventually they end up together.
However, I didn’t say that Oh Soo’s family was ‘cursed’ for no reason. It turns out that, if the successor (in this case Oh Soo) gives coffee to the person he loves, she will end up dying. And Yoo Ri just so happens to have had a sip before. The more their relationship starts to grow, the weaker Yoo Ri becomes. In the end, it seems that the only way for her to live is for Oh Soo to sever ties with her forever, but will they be okay even after falling so passionately in love?

First of all, to explain from the start Oh Soo’s family history in a nutshell: he lives with his grandfather (played by Park Geun Hyung) and older brother Oh Ga Na (played by Heo Jung Min). His grandfather and father inherited the curse of the tree, Ga Na didn’t. He isn’t able to see the auras or the pollen. Their father used to run the cafe. One day, in a period where his parents were fighting, Oh Soo brought a cup with love-pollen coffee that his father had made to his mother in the hope it would help them reconcile. However, this was a grave mistake. His father came too late, mom already drank the coffee. And from then on, the curse started working. Mother gradually started getting dizzy spells and got into multiple accidents. In the end, father couldn’t bear it anymore and ended his own life to save his wife from suffering because of this curse. And though the curse was lifted after he literally severed ties with her, mother was so unhappy after losing her husband that she too withered away. This is what makes Oh Soo so scared of falling in love.

First of all, I would like to say, it wasn’t the best drama I’ve watched. There were a lot of discontinuities in the editing, the acting was occasionally sloppy and there were a lot of plotholes. However, I still enjoyed it. It was cute and a typical K-Drama romance and I really liked the main couple.

I would first like to comment on the casting and the characters before I go on with some more elaborated criticism.

I didn’t know Lee Jong Hyun although I found out he’s a member of CNBLUE. I haven’t seen any other dramas with him so I can’t really judge his acting based on earlier performances, but I think he did generally well.
At first I thought Oh Soo was going to be this standard coldhearted guy only interested in work until a bright-spirited girl would show him the way of love, but he’s actually really pure.
He explains in the beginning that he doesn’t believe in love, that it only distracts people, etcetera etcetera, but in the end I think that he’s actually afraid of love rather than that he doesn’t believe in it. Because when he does fall in love himself he doesn’t attempt to get rid of his feelings, he actively pursues them. He’s just never experienced it before, and that’s why it’s easy to say he doesn’t believe in him. The only example he has is of his parents, which ended cruelly because of the tree’s curse.
Despite the angsty background story I thought he was a real bean, trying to hide his smiles when watching Yoo Ri and trying to create as many opportunities as possible to be near her. Living in the same neighborhood, a day wouldn’t usually go by without them running into each other, so that helped. And even when a love rival turns up, he doesn’t back off and only works harder to be there for Yoo Ri instead of the other guy.
The only other role I’ve seen of Kim So Eun is in Boys Over Flowers as Geum Jan Di’s best friend. It was funny to see her as a main lead, although I wasn’t very impressed by her performance. In the beginning it didn’t bother me that much, but I don’t know, Yoo Ri’s personality remained really bland to me until the end. Seo Yoo Ri is a very confident woman, she’s been taking care of her younger sister Soo Jung (played by Park Na Ye) ever since her father died and her mother got admitted to the hospital. But she didn’t really seem to have a social life, or any friends for that matter. The only time we see her drinking, if it’s not with either Oh Soo or Jin Woo, is with people from her neighborhood, and I’m talking middle-aged ladies. Apart from her police work and neighborhood charity work, she didn’t really seem to have a life, however cruel that may sound. There were no details to fill in to enrich her personality, like specific traits or hobbies. After finishing the series I really couldn’t say what she likes or what kind of person she is.
While I didn’t have the second male lead syndrome watching this series, I did feel for the second male lead, because it was Kang Tae Oh. I’ve now seen three series with him in total and I just love the actor too much to dislike him. Kim Jin Woo (played by Kang Tae Oh), is Yoo Ri’s childhood friend who finds her again after a long time, him now being her younger sister’s homeroom teacher. Jin Woo makes his intentions to Yoo Ri clear from the beginning, he’s also the first person to ask her out. Until the end, no matter how much he dislikes Oh Soo, he keeps supporting them and is basically the best guy friend a girl could have.
If there was a second female lead, I would probably say it was Han Hyo Jin (played by Kim Yeon Seo), because she went after Oh Soo in the beginning, but she ended up with his brother through a drunk one-night stand so she wasn’t really a love rival and Yoo Ri never felt threatened by her. I assume that this actress is relatively new because she doesn’t have her own page on dramawiki and AsianWiki only lists one other drama and movie with her.
I’ve seen Heo Jung Min before in Another Oh Hae Young, where he had a similar kind of role as here – the crazy brother. I get that he has this weird thing going on and that he’s cast as a comic relief because of his hysterical acting, but I am actually really curious to see him in a serious role. The way he would sometimes just start screaming his lines started annoying me a bit, making me think ‘why can’t he just say this in a normal way?’ And I personally didn’t like the blond hair look on him.

On the basis of beforementioned characters I will now work my way through my criticisms and take it from there.
First of all, I find the whole idea of a cafe that puts stuff in your coffee to mess with your emotions without the personal permission of the customers kind of disturbing. Of course it was all innocent and it was meant to give people a nudge in the right direction, but when I thought about it I really thought, what gives these people any right to meddle in the emotional affairs of people? Especially after finding out the true nature of the tree and that it was cursed and all… I would not be happy if I found out I made some radical emotional decision because someone put something in my coffee without my knowledge. So there was something wrong with that whole concept. If they’d made it a special cafe that people could go to who needed help with their emotions, okay. If you have a magic tree, add actual magic to the story. This, and the fact that the women in Oh Soo’s family (his grandmother and mother) were kept out of the whole curse story. They weren’t allowed to know. I mean, what kind of a marriage is that? Oh Soo’s mother seriously died indirectly because of a magical curse she knew nothing about. She never knew what actually happened to her and why, she never understood why her husband killed himself and no one ever thought to include her in knowing. I don’t know man, it stinks.

Back to Yoo Ri, I found it weird that they only showed she was a police officer in the second or third episode. Before that, it’s not even mentioned. They just suddenly showed her in a uniform and I was like… uhh okay? At first I even thought they were filming a drama in the drama in which she extra’d as a police officer or something.
And then there’s the story about her not being able to drink coffee, so that her mother made a special vending machine with warm milk and stuff for her that she has to take care of now. And then she’s drunk at the cafe and in a thirsty mood she just grabs a cup of coffee and drinks it like it’s nothing and also acts really casual about ‘yeah I was once rushed to a hospital because a drank coffee’. Girl, then why are you willingly drinking the coffee? There was literally a VASE of water in front of her. Bad writing. Of course for end motives they needed her to drink some of the coffee, but it could’ve been written so much better. Also, Oh Soo not finding out what happened to that cup of coffee -although it was thrown randomly on a couch somewhere- until months later when she literally tells him she drank the coffee that one time. Bad writing.
And I found it weird that the curse worked on them the same way as it did on his parents because 1. Oh Soo didn’t love Yoo Ri when she drink the coffee and 2. He didn’t give it to her, she drank it by accident. There were too many grey areas there.

One thing that really bothered me, and I mentioned this before, was the discontinuity in a lot of scenes, especially ending scenes and opening scenes. Every episode would start with the last scene from the previous episode. For example, one episode ends with Oh Soo and Yoo Ri coming across each other on the street and Oh Soo asks Yoo Ri something. While they are staring at each other, Jin Woo approaches and joins them, showing the love triangle in an actual triangle. End. And the next episode starts with the same scene, except now Oh Soo and Yoo Ri have an entire conversation before Jin Woo joins them. Details like this confused me.
Also, ‘accidentally’ not seeing someone while they were right in front of them, a cop not recognizing a culprit without his mask though she literally held him and stood next to him and saw his eyes.
Actually, this is what brings me to my next point: Yoo Ri’s credibility when it comes to being a cop. Because she did not seem like a good cop to me at all.
In scenes where she’d be chasing someone, she was clearly struggling. I could see that the actress did not have the stamina Yoo Ri claims to have.
She literally caught the culprit of the sexual assault case and was just about to take off his mask when she fainted, but when he appears before her as a food delivery guy, she does not see anything (height, eyes, whatever she WAS able to see) that alarms her. She actually lets him into her house and has dinner with him. So I would say sufficient wariness as a cop: no.
And it annoyed me that she didn’t honestly tell Oh Soo that she was having weird dizzy spells, even when he started pressing that these dizzy spells were important and dangerous.

Which brings me to my next point (I’m on a roll): the revelation of Oh Soo’s secret. Because as much as I liked his character, he ruined it for me when he started to do what every stupid boy in every Asian drama does when he finds out he is endangering the person he loves: instead of telling them the truth, he started being an ass. He broke up with Yoo Ri out of the blue and just started making up jerk reasons for not wanting to be with her anymore. He could’ve just told her the truth, she would’ve believed him. Because when he does tell her the truth a little later, she immediately believes him. There was absolutely no need for this unnecessary heartbreak. And it didn’t solve anything, because he could push her away as cruelly as he wanted, his true feelings for her still made the curse work. So it was actually not necessary. I was so pissed at him for doing it like that. Ending it like that without a normal explanation and then still crawling back to find out how she was doing. I mean, wasn’t he trying to get away from her? Anyway, it didn’t work, so he could’ve just told her the truth in the first place. Because after he did that, she understood why they had to break up.
I was actually happy when Jin Woo punched him in the face after he came back and asked how Yoo Ri was doing after breaking her heart. He deserved that. And he was a coward for trying to flee to Germany as an excuse to get away from her. In any case, what I’m trying to say is that the breakup was unnecessary.

My final major criticism is about the ending of the series. Oh Soo ‘sacrifices’ himself for Yoo Ri by drinking pollen from the dead rotten black flowers of the tree to save Yoo Ri and then falls into a sleep or coma, or something that he doesn’t wake up from. Yoo Ri doesn’t know any better than that he’s gone to Germany. Even Ga Na calls her to say that he’s gone to Germany.
The last thing we see of Oh Soo is that he’s in bed and his grandfather is shaking him, trying to wake him up to no result.
Then, all of a sudden, there is a time jump to three years later. But except from Yoo Ri wearing a different uniform and another woman having a child, everything and everyone is exactly the same. You’d say more changed in 3 years. I’d expected Ga Na to at least have dyed his hair another color or something. Not a very succesful time jump if you can’t show anything’s changed. Anywho, we suddenly see Oh Soo back in Korea (nothing is explained about what happened to him, how he got better, or anything). The only thing we learn is that he went to Germany and apparently lost part of his memories because he’s trying to find ‘that woman’ but he doesn’t know who she is. Of course, we know it’s Yoo Ri, but nothing is explained about what is going on. He still remembers his family and his colleague, but not Hyo Jin or Yoo Ri. Very weird. In the end, he finds Yoo Ri but still doesn’t remember her and then lastly there’s a scene at the sea they promised to go to together and he just smiles at her and she smiles back and they go for a walk. The end. Like. The whole series leads up to their passionate love for each other. They had a perfectly fine love story, it could’ve been wrapped so nicely, he was able to save her and himself, happy ending. Why end it in such an open and vague way?? I was so confused why they couldn’t have just made it a closed ending. Their relationship was so solid, it could’ve just ended with ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... IF YOU WISH READ ALL THE REVIEW ,

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> visit here... <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

. https://meicchisblog.ninja/2019/06/17/that-man-oh-soo/






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