Nam-soon is no ordinary girl. She has super strength, a trait that has been passed down in the women of her family for the past 500 years. Park’s Do Bong-soon, who pops up in a cameo here, is Nam-soon’s second cousin.

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For the past 10 years, Geum-joo has been trying to locate her daughter through a global annual contest for strong young women, while Nam-soon has been growing up with her adoptive sheepherding parents in the Mongolian steppe.

After Nam-soon remembers her name and that she comes from Gangnam, the Seoul neighbourhood that is home to many of Korea’s elite, she starts watching Korean TV to learn the language and sets to work herding sheep to save up money to return to South Korea and track down her mother.

Ten years later, she has finally saved up enough to make the trip, but just before her arrival, the young Chinese-Korean woman Ri Hwa-ja (Choi Hee-jin) wins the strong girl contest and is welcomed by Geum-joo with open arms, though others are not convinced that this is Nam-soon.

The real Nam-soon arrives and is checked for drugs by the young narcotics officer Kang Hee-sik (Ong Seong-wu) at the airport. Hee-sik temporarily confiscates some of Nam-soon’s prized belongings, including a mysterious golden wand given to her as a child, but promises to help her find her mother.

Bright-eyed and awestruck, Nam-soon explores the land she has come to know through her beloved K-dramas, even though she grew up there as a child.

Meanwhile, the scourge of drugs begins to infect Gangnam. Hee-sik is on the front lines trying to track down where they’re coming from, while Geum-joo does her own sleuthing at night, like a K-drama Batman but without the mask, as she seeks to clean up the neighbourhood.

Straight out of the gate, Strong Girl Nam-soon is brasher and more eager to please than its predecessor, resulting in a high-energy but low-impact product that doesn’t connect on the same emotional level.

The budget is higher and the colours more saturated, but whereas Park’s happy-go-lucky protagonist was charming, Lee’s kooky lead at times verges on grating.

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Granted, following in the footsteps of a modern K-drama classic was always going to be a challenge. But six years is an eternity in the K-drama landscape and with its frothy style, and by leaning heavily into familiar stereotypes, Strong Girl Nam-soon feels very much like a post-global-boom Korean drama.

Nam-soon is a Korean character but her return to Korea is presented as though she were a foreigner: specifically, a K-drama fan who has a false image of the country in her head waiting to be dashed. It’s a calculated gambit to appeal to the gigantic global K-drama fan base.

She also has an improbable speaking style which is overly casual – she claims to be too set in her way to use honorifics.

The bigger budget means bigger set pieces but these are overly cartoonish. The super-strength effects still look cheap, which was always part of the gag, but Strong Girl Nam-soon’s more ambitious action sequences feel a touch awkward.

This includes Nam-soon’s bumpy touchdown at Incheon Airport, when she bursts out of a skidding plane and pulls it to a stop. This worked better when Bong-soon was secretly saving a careering bus full of children, an effect created entirely through editing, rather than the sub-par visual effects employed here.

Meanwhile, there’s Geum-joo chasing down drug dealers during her night escapades, emerging from a Batcave-esque lair decked out in figure-hugging leather atop a motorbike. Sadly, these sequences call to mind Halle Berry’s Catwoman before any other screen incarnation of the character.

Nam-soon undoubtedly has a big adventure ahead of her in Gangnam, but will it be a memorable one?

Strong Girl Nam-soon is streaming on Netflix.