“Saints of the Narcos”
(Narco-Saints, Netflix)
Kang-Ing Go is a young South Korean who is having trouble supporting his wife and two children. He decides to go to Suriname, where the angler fish that come up on fishing rods are thrown into the garbage, while in South Korea they are considered a delicacy, and intends to import them to his homeland. At first the business works fine, after a while a delivery is stopped for inspection, and large quantities of cocaine are discovered in the fish. The business collapses. Kang-ing, who knew nothing about the smuggling, loses his money and is thrown into a Surinamese prison. In prison, he is recruited into the South Korean security services, is released, and joins the cocaine smuggling organization under cover in order to capture the main smuggler. End of summary.
The South Korean screenwriting, directing and acting abilities have already been written about here in this section, but it’s hard to ignore their poor qualities every time you come across them again. Not that “Narcos Saints” – based on a true story – is completely bad. She will hold a patient and forgiving viewer in front of her almost without needing a remote to fast forward parts. But too many times in a modern and invested series like “The Saints of the Narcos” the remote is almost crushed by the force of pressing the redemptive button.
It is difficult, as has been written here before, to understand how people living in such a technologically advanced country simultaneously produce such poorly filmed theater. The dialogues written by the screenwriters are comparable in quality to those of any elementary school community center in any western country. The actors spew out in bunches the superficial nonsense written by the screenwriters, and the directors apparently do not tear their hair out when they see the final product. There is nothing in who or what emerged from the screen that can create a feeling of identification or rejection or any other feeling that is created in the relationship between a viewer and a TV series – not with the hero, not with his wife who is left alone in the back and whose only job is to whine for whole episodes. The bad guy is also hard to hate, since his acting is so bad. The only reason To continue watching, the only thing is to know what happens next, otherwise it’s better to go down to the yard and make meatballs in the mud.
In Suriname, by the way, they received the series with fury, which premiered there in the first week of September. The main argument raised by the protesters in the small South American country was that the series gives the country a bad name, as if it were a wholesale producer of cocaine, and the authorities should find a legal way to prosecute its creators. Rest in peace Surinamese. More than their country gets a bad reputation, South Korea continues to solidify its position at the top of the creators of bad series coming to Netflix.
‰ To see or to give up: not to see. There are many series that are too successful to be caught on this one.