Review of Bloodhounds / 사냥개들 Season One

I had never heard of Bloodhounds until, suddenly, it was everywhere. It was on my social media feed, it was one of the top watches for everyone on Netflix, my dentist’s wife was even asking me after I got my cleaning if I had watched the drama yet.

And of course I had to watch it, especially considering there were only eight episodes. I hadn’t seen a drama with Woo Do-hwan before, but I was familiar with Kim Sae-ron and Lee Sang-yi. Granted, considering I didn’t even look the plot up with this one before pressing play, I could’ve been pleasantly surprised.

I was, at certain points. But overall I thought this drama was just okay. I’m familiar with this genre in Korean cinema and I think that a drama could really fall when it comes to this kind of action, and this drama starts to stumble for me around episode 5.

Although it’s only eight episodes and had all the chance to pack things in, I felt that it started losing a lot of focus, and with Kim’s DUI incident the writing simply doesn’t make sense after episode six. They should’ve just kept her in there at that point.

Anyways, onwards with the review.

Two boxing friends get caught up in the world of loan sharks and rich men.

This drama, at least for me, was all about the bromance between Gun-woo and Woo-jin, the two male leads.

We start off the drama by establishing that Gun-woo likes to use his boxing skills for good, as he takes an older man that might be drunk and removes him from a bus after he causes an uproar. But behind the scenes, his mother is scammed by loan sharks and takes out a loan that she cannot pay.

We’re introduced to Woo-jin after Gun-woo and he are in a fight in a boxing ring—which is one of the only times we end up seeing these two in a more formal setting.

As it turns out, a lot of small business owners are being targeted for loans they can’t forgive, as this drama is set during the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses are struggling right now.

Gun-woo has a mysterious encounter with a girl that uses a taser on him, but one night, when walking home, he gets a frantic phone call from his mother, who is at the shop.

A bunch of men are violently destroying their business because she has not made payments on her loan, and Gun-woo rushes home in order to try and get them away.

Using his boxing skills, he takes out a good chunk of the men, and finds out in the process that his mother owes $100,000 because of the interest. He has to get the money ASAP.

Together with Woo-jin, they try to find out ways to get the money. This ends up putting them in the path of Mr. Choi, who is the adoptive grandfather for the girl we spotted earlier in the series, Hyeon-ju.

We get a snapshot of some sinister background noise with Si-won’s character, who is being tortured by another wealthy man that has a lot of money and resources to do whatever he wants.

Mr. Choi hires Woo-jin and Gun-woo to protect Hyeon-ju, but she doesn’t actually want them to protect her. The trade-off is that Mr. Choi will give the money upfront to Gun-woo for his mother’s debt.

So the three end up making a small crime busting ring, as that tends to be Mr. Choi’s business of sorts. But as the episodes go on, they become more tangled with the affairs of the wealthy man from earlier, Kim Myeong-il.

He’s the CEO of a company but a big loan shark who will do whatever it takes to make his fortune even bigger, and the three protagonists want to take him down.

As they get more involved with it, against Mr. Choi’s wishes, more people are sent after them. When Mr. Choi eventually decides to give the green light to their operation, tragedy strikes.

Other members of their business are tracked down and brutally killed, including the pregnant wife of one of the associates. When Woo-jin and Mr. Choi are home alone one day, Kim’s men tracks them down to the house and violently strikes down Woo-jin, leaving him bloodied on the floor.

Mr. Choi’s throat is slashed, as he is in a wheelchair and unable to actually protect himself, and the house is set on fire. Hyeon-ju and Gun-woo return home to discover Woo-jin is barely alive, but Mr. Choi is long dead.

Gun-woo gives his blood for Woo-jin, but Hyeon-ju flees completely and heads to Rome, looking to achieve a goal of hers and Mr. Choi.

Woo-jin heals, and Gun-woo and he continue training out in the Korean countryside, specifically by the beach. They make an unhinged plan to return and take down Kim Myeong-il by themselves, then recruit Si-won’s character into it after a strange drinking session with the guy.

Their elaborate plan actually works, with the help of a female archer who moans at the fact the two boxers are staying with her, and the two men take home two gold bars for their hard work.

Overall Thoughts

This is a really condensed version of the show, but I really thought that the writing on this show could’ve been better. The boxing elements are great and I loved when they appeared, but they really mishandled the removal of Hyeon-ju like I mentioned before. I, too, wish I could randomly decide to go to Rome, but then it’s like she straight up never exists.

Then the final arc of the show really doesn’t make sense because of it and they bring back Si-won, who we last saw getting tortured and I presumed was dead at that point, to have his last laugh. All in all, I thought it was a show with a ton of potential, but it wasn’t the greatest.

It could’ve used more time to flesh out the story and narratives, because we also drop the vast majority of the characters by the time we get to episode six and suddenly we pretty much need a new crew for this last adventure.

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