Strong Girl Nam-Soon (2023) || Sub-Par At Best?

I’d heard a lot about the series I’m about to review. Some were fairly good and others not so much. Not being one to be swayed by reviews of the crowd, I decided to watch it myself and decide whether or not the reviews I got were spot-on.
I know I decided not to watch series in this genre for a while but let’s just get to how this one went.

Strong Girl Nam-Soon (2023)

Strong Girl Nam-Soon is a 2023 South Korean television series starring Lee Yoo-mi in the title role, along with Kim Jung-eun, Kim Hae-sook, and other renowned Korean actors. The series is a spin-off to the 2017 series Strong Girl Bong-soon, which although the main characters aren’t exactly related, they are still closely joined in the same mutant-strength universe.

Summary of the Series

Gang Nam Soon(Lee Yoo Mi) has superhuman strength which has been passed to the women of her family for generations. But she goes missing as a kid in Mongolia. Years later she’s back to Seoul, South Korea to find her parents. She eventually gets to reunite with her mother, Hwang Geum-Joo, an extremely wealthy woman who lives in Gangnam and strives to live righteously and do good deeds with the hope that she will find her lost daughter.

With the reunion of Nam-Soon with her family, including her grandmother, Gil Joong-Gan who shares the same superhuman strength, they somehow get involved in a deadly drug case and together with Kang Hee-Sik, a detective also working on the case, they seek to eliminate this wide-sweeping evil. Can truth, love and above all family triumph?

My Review and Rating

Okay, if you’ve watched the original series, Strong Girl Go Bong-soon, you would agree with me that this was a highly anticipated series. It’s just sad to see that it fell incredibly short. In a lot of ways. I don’t have the least to greatest noticeable faults but I’ll try to bring the few ones I can all together.

I wasn’t so smiley seeing who the protagonist was at her adult age but I was determined to roll with it if she wasn’t needlessly childish and annoying. There’s this desperation I see in a lot of Korean series for the protagonist to be cuter than necessary. And in the case of Nam Soon, it was overdone. She’s a grown woman so the need to act childish and cute when tackling serious events didn’t endear her to me in the least. It’s not something I like to do but I found myself skipping some parts.

Then there’s the overdose of the mother. At some point, I asked myself why the movie was named after the daughter if the mother would get more than sixty percent of screen time. I feel like the series would have thrived more if she was made a secondary character as intended, likewise the grandmother. But they appeared in far too many scenes until I started losing sight of what the series was all about.

There were too many side-plots and unnecessary scenes that failed to add anything substantial to the drama as a whole. I get the usual comic sounds and play at comedy that is typical for Korean Drama but this one fell short for me. The gluttonous brother and spineless (literally) Uncle while enjoyable in the first few episodes, became less funny with the constant repetition. Sub-par to a fault.

And can we please talk about chemistry?? Which, might add both the male and female leads did a terrible job at. We all know that you can see a max of two or if you’re lucky, three kissing scenes in an entire series but somehow, that slow burn is endearing and we get to squeal in delight when it eventually happens. My eyes, brethren, practically glazed over in boredom watching them because there was no chemistry from beginning to end. Everything felt so stuff from their end and frankly, her Grandmother and her barista love interest had way more chemistry than the protagonist’s.

I think the most depressing part about the series is with the villain, whose acting I found charming. Way more charming than the main lead. This is not a “I love villains” tale but I genuinely feel like he could have been treated better. A Russian Mafia all right but he opened up to her and had an excellent back story that while didn’t justify his action, made him seem more humane and the “goddess of kindness” which is Nam Soon didn’t empathize with him till the last moment that made it seem cruel and unrealistic to me.

There was an overdose of renowned actors and it felt like they didn’t know what to do with them so they just placed them everywhere. The acting was superb on the part of the secondary characters but I just disliked how forced everything felt to me. The ending was so anticlimactic, I was genuinely surprised. It felt so carelessly done, so low-effort, I was grateful to be over it. I feel disappointed that it didn’t live up to expectations but it’s one of those things.

Giving Strong Girl Nam-Soon a 6/10 stars. There was an open kind of ending that promises a sequel but I think I’ll pass on that.

Jhymi🖤

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