City Hunter

So, this tv show came up with a 3.9 rating on our Netflix. Usually I enjoy anything with a 3.5 or above, so I thought I would give this one a try.

"City Hunter" starts in 1983 when a secret sweep mission is sent by five South Korean men to take out
several North Korean officials in retaliation for a bombing. After the men are already sent, the five men come under a lot of pressure from the U.S. and other countries not to retaliate. In order to keep their actions a secret, they have the twenty-one men killed on the mission. Only one man escapes. He returns to Seoul, kidnaps his best friend (who was one of the ones killed) and raises him with the sole purpose of using him to get revenge on the five men.

The story picks up in 2011 with the son, Lee Yoon Sung, returning to Seoul, posing as a Korean American, recently graduated from MIT. He gets a job in the government's IT security department and starts hunting down the men who ordered his father's death.

The thing is, he turns out to be a really great guy. He feels the best revenge is to expose the men and their corruption, destroy their reputations and their lives, kidnap them and turn them over the the prosecutor's office. His adopted dad, though, really wants him to be killing all of these people. When the son refuses to do it, he comes to Seoul to take care of it himself. Also, he keeps trying to get Lee Yoon Sung to get angry enough at these men to kill them, which involves some truly sinister activities.

So Lee Yoon Sung is caught in this crazy situation where he is trying to take down these men, yet keep them safe from his father. All the while, he has to maintain his secret identity because a Prosecutor wants to catch him for being a vigilante. The men he is trying to take down start sending people after him. He falls in love with a body guard, Kim NaNa, who just happens to guard several of the people he is trying to kidnap.

The story moves a little bit slowly at times, and there are a lot of emotional moments with closeups on characters' faces or clenched fists. But overall, it's an awesome story. I got totally engrossed in it for several days - to the point where I actually had a dream in "Korean" with subtitles (no lie). There are a lot of twists and turns and it also has great social commentary. I highly recommend it.