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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Lucky Romance" Episode 8

A rather disproportionate amount of the romance in "Lucky Romance" quite literally seems to consist of Soo-ho talking to himself. Which is funny since Bonnie is the character more easily described as objectively crazy. Bonnie's ecstatic descriptions of her sister's improving condition go a tad too far considering what little actual progress Bo-ra has made. At the same time, no one is much in the mood to argue with her since for now Bonnie's behavior is approximately normal.

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And that's pretty much all that happens. How "Lucky Romance" can spend an entire hour without really doing much of anything in terms of story remains a mystery to me. The drama has just hit the halfway point and yet there's barely been enough substance to even really make sense for the quarterway point. While I'm glad Bonnie has stopped acting dangerously, her character now lacks motivation. And the male leads, well, their motivation is just to get together with Bonnie without actually having to talk to her.

Ryu Jun-yeol is doing the best with what he has. I rather liked the scene where he tries to get advice on what to do from the Internet. Unsurprisingly, this advice is not terribly helpful, and so Soo-ho spends most of the scene in self-reproach. The problem is, television dramas are not supposed to be one man shows. It's a discomforting sign when the best scenes could easily be translated to a stand up comedy bit and not lose much in the process.

Part of the problem is with the game development scenes, which lack almost any kind of urgency and worse than that don't even make much consistent logical sense. One scene Soo-ho acts like doing things the specific correct way is an essential part of the process even when it obviously makes other people uncomfortable. Then later on he'll do something much more important in an obviously wrong way just because of his feelings toward Bonnie.

I really do want Bo-ra to wake up, less because I care about her character and more because "Lucky Romance" desperately needs some sort of new fresh dynamic to keep the story going. I constantly get the sense that the production team is running out of ideas because so much of the material is redundant. "Lucky Romance" is getting very dull very quickly, and that's about the only crime a drama can commit that's worse than being explicitly bad.

Review by William Schwartz

"Lucky Romance" is directed by Kim Kyeong-hee-II, written by Choi Yoon-gyo and features Hwang Jung-eum, Ryu Jun-yeol, Lee Chung-ah and Lee Soo-hyuk.

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