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Pierce Conran

2/5 stars
Lead cast: Jo Yoon-su, Kim Seon-ho, Cha Seung-won, Kim Kang-woo
Posturing is the name of the game in Disney+’s hard-to-follow sci-fi action series The Tyrant, which puts style over substance and narrative cohesion.
For the first time since Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, Kim Seon-ho is back on the small screen as Director Choi of Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), who goes rogue when a programme he has been running, unofficially known as “The Tyrant”, takes on a life of its own.


The final sample of the programme is lost during a delivery and now everyone wants to get their hands on it. This includes Choi himself, as well as Paul (Kim Kang-woo, Artificial City), who works for a US intelligence agency and wants to destroy it, and mysterious woman Chae Jae-gyeong (Jo Yoon-su, The Interest of Love), who is hired to steal it.
Also in the mix is ex-agent Lim Sang (Cha Seung-won, Our Blues), a hit man who has been tasked with eliminating everyone connected to The Tyrant programme.
Although that sounds relatively straightforward, it could not be further from the truth.
While it is never fully explained, The Tyrant programme appears to be concerned with developing super soldiers of some kind. However, since Paul is already protected by a retinue of his own super soldiers, it is not clear why this programme is necessary.

Paul, who we first meet in Thailand, lives in Japan and speaks English poorly. He is supposed to be a US government agent, but he behaves as though the NIS are his subordinates, making it rather hard to understand how these international government agencies are connected to one another.
More confusing is Jae-gyeong, the main character of the series. She is introduced at the funeral of her father, and other characters explain that she has a dissociative identity disorder – her male twin brother being her second identity.
Jae-gyeong is a lithe and powerful fighter who tears through dozens of trained men without batting an eyelid. It seems she has some special powers, although again the show doesn’t bother to make this clear.
Her motivations are also rather opaque. She gets her hands on the sample and confronts various characters whose connections to the story are never explained, such as a gangster running a nightclub. Eventually, she teams up with the assassin Sang.

This exceptionally confusing, although very stylish show comes from Park Hoon-Jung, the director of pulpy theatrical fare such as New World and The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion.
Given all the shadowy organisations, its superhuman concept and its blood-splattered female lead, the show shares much in common with the latter. Unfortunately, it is even more similar to the lamentable sequel The Witch: Part 2. The Other One, another baffling parade of people bludgeoning each other with little rhyme or reason.
Everyone in The Tyrant is hard as nails and cool as a cucumber, which leads to endless scenes of characters glaring at each other. Since they are so concerned with looking cool in front of their adversaries, these characters tend to be very poor communicators. Little can be gleaned from their conversations.
Of course, the characters aren’t always talking, but Park makes sure that they are always using their mouths, even if no words come out of them. If they are not chain smoking, they are either making disgusting clicking sounds with their mouths or aggressively munching on toast and sandwiches.

Having introduced Kim Da-mi to the world in The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, Park once again plucks a young actress from obscurity, in this case Jo Yoon-su, covers her in blood and shoves her front and centre.
While Jo is fine as the taciturn Jae-gyeong, the character she has been charged with playing is aggressively bland. Furthermore, she is far too similar to the many hard-starting female killers of recent K-content, including the protagonists of Park’s The Witch films and Ballerina.
Kim Seon-ho had some fun playing the killer protagonist in The Childe last year, also directed by Park, but struggles with Director Choi, another wafer-thin character.
The only person who stands out is Cha, playing the delightfully eccentric killer Sang.

The Tyrant marks Park’s small-screen debut as a director – the show was originally intended as a film for cinematic release, before being turned into a four-part series during post-production and sold to Disney+.
Given the slowness of the Korean film industry’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, with most movies failing to recoup their costs during their runs in cinemas, producers have been turning to the streaming companies; a sale to one of those platforms guarantees a return on investment.
The producers of Mission: Cross, which was scheduled to open in cinemas during the 2024 Lunar New Year holiday, pivoted to streaming – the movie debuted on Netflix last Friday.
In a first for Disney+ Korea, The Tyrant dropped all four of its episodes at once on launch day.
The Tyrant is streaming on Disney+.


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In Disney+ series a spy agency loses control of a programme, prompting a scramble by a mystery cast of characters whose motives are obscure


Intended as a film before dropping as a 4-part series on Disney+, The Tyrant is stylish but confusing. Kim Seon-ho plays a spy chief but it is Cha Seung-won, as an eccentric assassin, who stands out.


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Review | Disney+ K-drama The Tyrant review: Kim Seon-ho in violent action sci-fi that’s convoluted

In Disney+ series a spy agency loses control of a programme, prompting a scramble by a mystery cast of characters whose motives are obscure