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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Full Sun" Episode 1

Yeong-won (played by Han Ji-hye) is a woman whose lifelong dream has been to attend an international jewlery convention and win the grand prize for best jewlery or something. Is there anybody who can relate to this? Granted, I'm a guy, and I'm not a big fan of diamonds considering where most of them come from. At the same time, though, "The Full Sun" does almost nothing insofar as explaining why an unengaged person (no pun intended) should care about a bunch of shiny rocks.

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The focus, rather, is on explaining how the events in this drama conspired to cause a tragic unnecessary death. Of course, when the background for this is an international diamond convention...you know, that violent robberies would be involved is kind of a predictable outcome. Events like this necessitate elaborate security because this kind of jewelry is by definition so outrageously valuable that whoever's running these events is going to expect attempted thievery as a matter of course.

Not this particular jewelry convention, though. There is, as far as I can tell, exactly one security guard who actually cares about his job. No one else on the team can even be bothered to confirm whether a robbery took place. They're terribly lazy. Or maybe just incompetent. Either way I hope the patrons took out insurance on their overly valuable cargo. This place is practically begging for thieves to come along and steal everything.

The criminals aren't much better. Their plan only works because the security at this convention is so awful- and once their heist succeeds they continue doing other dumb incomprehensible stuff. You have the diamonds? Great, everybody go home and collect the cash later. Don't commit a kidnapping. Why do they commit a kidnapping? Because the script says they have to in order to set up the drama's principal dilemma. That a dumb preventable death is caused for no reason except to cause dramatic angst.

You may notice this review is only addressing the plot and not discussing the characters. That's because there's nothing to discuss. I have no idea why Yeong-won, or any other character for that matter, cares so much about diamonds. There's no real discussion of motivation, no exhibition of personality, not even the vaguest outline of general logic. All the focus is on the lead-up to this ridiculously contrived diamond heist that makes almost no sense. So far "The Full Sun" has done a better job educating me on the finer points of Thai architecture than anything remotely relevant to the actual storyline. So far this drama is just plain lousy. I can only hope writer Heo Seong-hye has something more intelligent to discuss now that the basic set-up is out of the way.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Full Sun" is directed by Bae Kyeong-soo, Kim Jung-hyun-III, written by Heo Seong-hye and features Yoon Kye-sang, Han Ji-hye and Cho Jin-woong.

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