He is doomed to perish horribly a dozen more times before being sent to hell, but if he can prevent any of those deaths he may continue to live as that person.
Death’s Game: Park So-dam, Seo In-guk in fantasy-action K-drama
Death’s Game: Park So-dam, Seo In-guk in fantasy-action K-drama
After getting the hang of the game during the first few deaths, Yee-jae spends a few lives trying to get, and most importantly keep his hands on, a giant bag of money.
It is only at the end of the first batch of episodes, when Yee-jae meets his girlfriend, Lee Ji-su (Go Yoon-jung), again while living as the handsome model Jang Geon-u (Lee Do-hyun), that he begins to think beyond himself, and therefore starts to learn his lesson.
However, after Geon-u and Ji-su are killed by the psychopathic corporate chairman Park Tae-woo (Kim Ji-hoon), Yee-jae becomes consumed with revenge – the moral lessons will have to wait.
After setting a trap to record Tae-woo in the act of murder, Yee-jae conveniently returns as detective Ahn Ji-hyung (Oh Jung-se), the incarnation who gets the most screen time in the series.
Yee-jae gets his revenge, but while living as Ji-hyung he also learns to be selfless. Yet the detective is only round 11 – there’s still one more soul to go.
The last episode of the series devotes itself entirely to melodramatic wrap-up. The story was always destined to go there, but the sharp cut between extreme violence and pure schmaltz is a jarring one.
For a show that has until now revelled in stylised and grisly bloodletting, the pat moralising feels a touch disingenuous.
12 of the best new Korean drama series to watch in January 2024
12 of the best new Korean drama series to watch in January 2024
Death’s Game is the kind of pulpy entertainment where quibbling over plot points is ill-advised. The plot moves quickly and the storytelling mode switches often, forcing logic to take a back seat to visceral thrills and emotional swings.
Suspension of disbelief is imperative and, thanks to its sheer entertainment value, the show earns our approval – we don’t mind looking the other way when the story neglects to connect its own dots. Yet there is one element in its central premise that was a little hard to ignore.
Yee-jae’s experience playing Death’s game is an elaborate ploy to make him realise how precious life is. No matter how hard things get it’s not something to be cast aside lightly, especially because of the people who will be left behind.
It’s a nice idea, but one that is only achieved by having Yee-jae leapfrog into people’s bodies before they have died. Those other souls are all prematurely removed from their own lives, seemingly never to return again, so that Yee-jae may be afforded the chance to learn his lesson.
This isn’t really a problem most of the time, as we’re too busy following Yee-jae and his 12 incarnations through a series of brashly plotted and well-threaded vignettes. It’s only at the 11th hour, when the show gives us its big moral lesson, that it strikes an off key.
But if we’re being honest, the story that grabbed us was Yee-jae’s post-suicide tribulations. Had he originally stepped back from the brink, we never would have tuned in.
Death’s Game is streaming on Amazon Prime.