Sunday, August 29, 2010

Review of Akuma no You na Onna 悪魔のような女

Title: Akuma no You na Onna (A Woman Like The Devil)
Cast: Kanno Miho, Nakamura Tooru, Asano Yuko

This is 2 hr drama SP under the TV Asahi Sat night series. This time slot usually features mystery/horror short stories and the drama prior to this was the Kindaichi Kosuke and Akechi Kogoro which I reviewed earlier. It's not always that there are many big names in the cast and being a weekly thing, they certainly can't splurge on the production. Occassionally, there are bigger projects like the Kindaichi vs Akechi SP but I do see a lot of relatively unknown names in the cast for most of the series.

I don't watch the dramas from this time slot most of the time but the cast got me interested so I gave it a try. Well, the production quality cannot be compared to the amount of investment given for regular season dramas and it does the cast a big disservice since the storyline is so flimsy that it doesn't take a genius to find out what's going on. The people who are supposed to die don't die and come back for the culprit and then the real baddies get scared to death by their victim.

The story is so "uninteresting" that I almost fell asleep for the first 45 minutes or so. It is only when the murder takes place that things start to heat up a little but when you get to the ending, I guess you can't help but curse at the stupidity.

I'm usually quite critical of mystery/investigative dramas and I did see rather good ones before and those were relatively low-budget ones which did not boast of big stars. The thing about these investigative dramas is that the culprit is usually a big name so you can easily identify who is the murderer just by looking at the cast. That kills the fun but you have to realize that they can't let a supporting actor/actress be the culprit anyway.

This drama is not really recommended even if you have time to kill. I forwarded through most of the drama at the beginning portion and finished it within 1 hour. I should have used that time to watch something else...

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