Small confession: I haven’t seen Squid Games. It’s true. But on to Narco Saints.
Amid a highly fraught couple of years, an ultra-violent parable on apex capitalism holds little appeal after coming home from an eight-hour (plus) day wrestling, in rather less vivid colour, with the vagaries of said capitalism.
Happily, while it’s perhaps the best known, it’s only one of the runners and riders of Netflix’s growing and varied K-drama stable, whose popularity and meme-worthy reach defies truisms about US audiences and the ‘one-inch wall’. Narco Saints, an original Korean-language action thriller, is set to drop on September 9th. K-drama, like K-pop remains a global social force (though attempts from major Hollywood studios to leverage k-culture to boost pan-Asian box office tend to fall flat).
Narco Saints on Netflix
Narco Saints shares a cast member, as well as a broad category with Squid Games (Park Hae-Soo) and mirrors western form in the defection of film talent to TV’s dark side (The Spy Gone North’s Yoon Jong-bin). The series also features a supporting cast including Yoo Yeon-seok (Hospital Playlist, Dr. Romantic), Jo Woo-jin (Alienoid, Happiness), as well as Chang Chen (Dune, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) in a cameo role.
Named for a cult which transforms notorious drug traffickers into icons of worship (and whose striking iconography influences notable films of the nineties and early aughts – see Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliet, or Once Upon a Time in Mexico), Narco Saints starts with an old-fashioned premise, straight from the pages of John Le Carre and Graham Greene: a hapless-seeming everyman of modest talent and ambition (Ha Jung-woo) finds himself embroiled in a secret mission. This one: to take down a Korean drug lord operating in Suriname (for the curious, the indolent and the Google-averse: Suriname’s a small, Dutch-speaking republic on the northern coast of South America, which I did, I also confess, look up).
Teasers promise a narrative of explosive action and flexible morals, in the vein of Mr. Nice and American Made, both loose, freewheeling retellings of true-crime stories that turn smugglers into cool, raffish folk heroes for the screen.
Though there’s much to enjoy and to criticise in the current trend of TV series’ being made effectively as ten-hour films, rather than true television serials, Narco Saints looks as though it might lean further to the former that than the latter. From trailers, it’s heavy on kinetic set-pieces and tropical locations, rather than the delicate, slow-burn bijoux character studies of say, Mad Men, The Sopranos or In Treatment. Narco Saints’ debut might not break too many moulds, but it represents part of a varied televisual diet, for those who care to scale the wall.
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