This review may contain spoilers
Consistently Terrible — and Somehow I Still Finished It
I went into Capture Lover looking for something short, easy, and emotionally undemanding. On those three points, it delivered. Unfortunately, it also delivered some of the worst acting, dubbing, editing, and general production quality I can remember seeing in a drama.
The premise itself is perfectly workable: enemies-to-lovers combined with a fake relationship that eventually becomes real. Ding Junjie dislikes Ying Jiaming, the spoiled chairman’s son who first makes his work life miserable and then unexpectedly becomes his boss. When Jiaming needs a fake boyfriend to escape his obsessive ex-girlfriend, Junjie gets pulled into the role. There is absolutely a decent little BL hiding somewhere inside that setup.
The problem is that the drama never convincingly gets from Point A to Point B.
We are told, largely through repeated flashbacks, that their antagonistic fake relationship has gradually become love. But the original scenes did not show that emotional progression. Replaying them later with sentimental music does not suddenly give them romantic meaning they did not have the first time. Episode 5 is nearly half flashbacks to scenes from episodes 1–4. Episode 6 gives us at least another couple of minutes of the same footage, and those scenes return yet again later. In a ten-episode drama where most episodes run only 10–20 minutes, that is an enormous amount of precious runtime spent essentially saying, “Look at this again, but now please understand that they were falling in love.”
The acting does not help.
It is bad. Not merely inexperienced or stiff, but sometimes so painfully overdone that scenes clearly intended to be emotional became comedy for me. I laughed repeatedly when I absolutely was not supposed to.
The confession from Junjie’s female best friend, who has supposedly loved him quietly for ten years, was one of the worst offenders. Then we get Jiaming’s completely unhinged ex-girlfriend kidnapping Junjie and threatening to kill him regardless of Jiaming’s choice—and herself as well if he chooses Junjie. The higher the emotional stakes became, the more the performances veered into exaggerated community-theater melodrama.
The actor playing Junjie begins the drama noticeably stronger than almost everyone around him. By the end, the actor playing Jiaming has more or less caught up with him. That is not the same thing as saying either performance became particularly good, but at least the two leads eventually felt fairly evenly matched.
Then there is the dubbing.
I genuinely could not believe how poor the sound work was. A character could speak one sentence at one volume and the next at a completely different volume, with the splice clearly audible. Lips regularly moved long before the dialogue arrived. At one point Junjie completely zips up his coat—and only after he finishes do we hear the zipper sound. The entire production is full of distracting technical problems like this.
The physical intimacy is equally awkward. This is not a complaint about there being only two kisses or limited skinship; I do not need a certain number of intimate scenes for a romance to work. I need whatever intimacy is shown to feel believable. Here, the blocking is so obvious that I was sometimes laughing at that too. One kiss lands at the side of the mouth, the other is basically a peck, and much of the remaining “intimacy” consists of things like a hand moving over a partially bare chest while everyone looks extremely aware that they are filming an intimate scene. Restraint can be incredibly romantic. This was not restraint. It simply looked uncomfortable.
The music is poor as well, sometimes loud enough to interfere with the dialogue, and during one song I found myself wondering if the singer was actually off-key. The dialogue frequently matches the acting in cringe level.
And then there is poor Ding Junjie’s makeup. For much of the drama, someone apparently attempted to contour his eyelid crease using dark brown shadow and then simply…forgot to blend it. So he spends scene after scene with a very visible brown line across his eyelids.
Which is unfortunate, because the actor has genuinely gorgeous eyes. That may be the nicest thing I can say about this production.
Capture Lover is consistently terrible from beginning to end.
And somehow, inexplicably, I watched every episode.
Perhaps that is its greatest achievement. At some point I stopped watching to see whether the drama would become good and started watching because I needed to know what fresh production disaster would happen next.
It never disappointed me on that front.
The premise itself is perfectly workable: enemies-to-lovers combined with a fake relationship that eventually becomes real. Ding Junjie dislikes Ying Jiaming, the spoiled chairman’s son who first makes his work life miserable and then unexpectedly becomes his boss. When Jiaming needs a fake boyfriend to escape his obsessive ex-girlfriend, Junjie gets pulled into the role. There is absolutely a decent little BL hiding somewhere inside that setup.
The problem is that the drama never convincingly gets from Point A to Point B.
We are told, largely through repeated flashbacks, that their antagonistic fake relationship has gradually become love. But the original scenes did not show that emotional progression. Replaying them later with sentimental music does not suddenly give them romantic meaning they did not have the first time. Episode 5 is nearly half flashbacks to scenes from episodes 1–4. Episode 6 gives us at least another couple of minutes of the same footage, and those scenes return yet again later. In a ten-episode drama where most episodes run only 10–20 minutes, that is an enormous amount of precious runtime spent essentially saying, “Look at this again, but now please understand that they were falling in love.”
The acting does not help.
It is bad. Not merely inexperienced or stiff, but sometimes so painfully overdone that scenes clearly intended to be emotional became comedy for me. I laughed repeatedly when I absolutely was not supposed to.
The confession from Junjie’s female best friend, who has supposedly loved him quietly for ten years, was one of the worst offenders. Then we get Jiaming’s completely unhinged ex-girlfriend kidnapping Junjie and threatening to kill him regardless of Jiaming’s choice—and herself as well if he chooses Junjie. The higher the emotional stakes became, the more the performances veered into exaggerated community-theater melodrama.
The actor playing Junjie begins the drama noticeably stronger than almost everyone around him. By the end, the actor playing Jiaming has more or less caught up with him. That is not the same thing as saying either performance became particularly good, but at least the two leads eventually felt fairly evenly matched.
Then there is the dubbing.
I genuinely could not believe how poor the sound work was. A character could speak one sentence at one volume and the next at a completely different volume, with the splice clearly audible. Lips regularly moved long before the dialogue arrived. At one point Junjie completely zips up his coat—and only after he finishes do we hear the zipper sound. The entire production is full of distracting technical problems like this.
The physical intimacy is equally awkward. This is not a complaint about there being only two kisses or limited skinship; I do not need a certain number of intimate scenes for a romance to work. I need whatever intimacy is shown to feel believable. Here, the blocking is so obvious that I was sometimes laughing at that too. One kiss lands at the side of the mouth, the other is basically a peck, and much of the remaining “intimacy” consists of things like a hand moving over a partially bare chest while everyone looks extremely aware that they are filming an intimate scene. Restraint can be incredibly romantic. This was not restraint. It simply looked uncomfortable.
The music is poor as well, sometimes loud enough to interfere with the dialogue, and during one song I found myself wondering if the singer was actually off-key. The dialogue frequently matches the acting in cringe level.
And then there is poor Ding Junjie’s makeup. For much of the drama, someone apparently attempted to contour his eyelid crease using dark brown shadow and then simply…forgot to blend it. So he spends scene after scene with a very visible brown line across his eyelids.
Which is unfortunate, because the actor has genuinely gorgeous eyes. That may be the nicest thing I can say about this production.
Capture Lover is consistently terrible from beginning to end.
And somehow, inexplicably, I watched every episode.
Perhaps that is its greatest achievement. At some point I stopped watching to see whether the drama would become good and started watching because I needed to know what fresh production disaster would happen next.
It never disappointed me on that front.
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