Hello, you're watching AvenueX and today let's talk about a recently finished airing chinese drama.
Wu Mian Zhi Jing, Desire Catcher
This is a 24 episode contemporary drama that has finished airing on the perform Mango TV
directed by Wang Taotao, written by Zhang Xiaohe as the lead script writer plus 4 more script writers
based on a novel written by the author Zhou Haohui called Xie E Cui Mian Shi.
literally meaning Evil Hypnotist, this author has a series of books.
They all have the same lead character as the police team leader Luo Fei,
although in his original set of works,this constantly repeating character
actually is kind of the same person and not the same person
because their timeline and what happens to the them actually conflict between different books
and the drama is led by Zheng Yecheng and Xin Yunlai as the two male leads.
One of them hypnotist, the other one a policeman.
I have finished watching all 24 episodes and I have a very mixed feeling.
I will give it one gold mine rating, some parts of the drama perform is definitely below the one gold mine line
some parts over, here we're only talking about the drama version,
the book I have a rough idea about what it is about,
but I haven't read it page to page.
Right from the beginning of the drama,
you're gonna encounter the encounter of the two male leads.
Xin Yunlai playing the role Luo Fei, who is a team leader of a crime investigation division of a police station,
a very cold and stern person and you're gonna get to know him better as the story develops
and why he's such a personality person, our other male lead character
Lu Fengping played by zheng ye cheng is a professional hypnotist
coming in prepared and with a hidden motive approaching Luo Fei the policeman
as an officially hired consultant on cases, as they go on investigating different cases,
you will also see the main line of why the characters do the things they do.
And what is the big thing that happened in their past that kind of link them altogether.
The two male leads plus another female policeman.
That's the best way to explain it without really spoiling any important information.
Now let's get into the good and bad part as usual, on the positive end.
Number one, this drama is very Mango production.
It has that Mango look and Mango style.
I like how it makes the sets and the color palette and the lighting and transitions
all come together very smoothly and very coherently.
It definitely looks like a drama that's been designed and they intentionally wanted to look a certain way
and they carry that throughout the whole thing.
Couple of points that I really appreciate.
For example, the leading actors all use their own voice,
although I think both leads' line delivery can get a little bit more work
I do hope they improve in the future, but it doesn't create any problem.
And I much prefer their real voice.
One extra point I want to point out is the ending song is just so good,
but so obvious,
because it is a song that literally starts with the singing voice, and it comes right at you.
And it's a female male singing song with a bit rapping involved.
And the song songwriter of this song is known to really love writing songs of this particular style
that reminds you of many many high romance Korean dramas.
It's gonna remind you of multiple Korean drama theme songs if you watch a lot of K dramas in recent 5 years
and it gets into your brain very easily.
The first day when this drama airs, I went in checking and I think they aired 6 episodes on the same day
and I heard that song 6 times, that night in my dream,
that song was playing in the background in my head for a whole night,
at least for for the amount of dream I can remember on the night.
So if you're a person who can easily get influenced by music, listen to it with caution.
And in a way, I almost feel the song is too big for the drama itself,
just because the drama is not so dramatic and tragic.
I mean the song sounds like everybody dies in the world.
Then the second thing let's talk about actors casting in the roles
The other positive thing for me, even though this drama has a lot of problems to me,
at least I don't have a problem problem with most of the casting.
And I really appreciate that they pick really suitable actors and actresses for almost every role
2 main leads, Zheng Yecheng and Xin Yunlai, I did ship them a bit,
particularly the early stage of the drama, later, because the plot kind of falls apart.
And when the logic of things don't work out so well, kind of find it's really hard to sink into the person personal relationship.
But I'd say the earlier parts, oh there's definitely push and pull
and there's intentional shots that they made for ... you know .... just like helping people to ship them.
They are not BL couple in any way okay, but you can think about it as bromance.
And they really go together very well.
The two actors seem to get along really well.
And then on screen chemistry is pretty nice too.
In terms of their individual performances, Xin Yunlai when it's highly emotionally charged, needs a bit work.
He tends to completely lose control of his clarity of dictation, and voice sounds extremely untrained.
The voice needs a lot of work when he is too emotional.
In that department Zheng Yecheng kind of has more experience over the years has been working definitely on more projects.
So you definitely can feel his more experienced actor.
In this drama. He has a wig, I think because of the time scheduling thing,
he has two different hairstyle in this drama and they just can't do it on his real hair.
So 99% of the time in this drama that curly hair is a wig, I mean it looks good,
but then you can tell it's a wig because the hairline is different from his natural hairline
and in different shot the length changes.
Sometimes the style changes, also where they put the hairline slightly shifts,
because different days different makeup artist probably and it's not just always working out perfectly.
And if you're very sensitive to these things, it may bother you.
I really can tell people's hairline like within millimeter accuracy.
And when it shifts, the face instantly changes into another face to me and it's very weird.
So for the 2 male leads, i'm more than happy.
I like their individual character, their acting overall and then their chemistry
then for supporting roles, the actress He Yuhe who plays the main female role in the drama Liang Yin
She's pretty good. I really like her character arc
then there's a policeman character Xiao Liu played by Hu Wenzhe
he is definitely intentionally written as some kind of emotional turning point for our main characters,
very lovely character and probably most of the audiences watching drama would really like him.
Then there are many cases, so it has different unit characters.
You're gonna come across a couple of familiar faces from the days of Guardian.
If you were a guardian fan back in 2018,
when you see those faces show up and they have pretty important plot,
you're gonna laugh secretly,
then the main boss bad guy in the story, not gonna spoil that person here,
but he's worked with Zheng Yecheng before in another drama.
He did a pretty decent job playing this role.
The last thing about this drama is although I feel after episode 16 pretty much it starts to crumble in a very expected way.
Honestly speaking, previous episodes in previous cases,
some of them are really good.
It reminds you of certain criminal cases you come across in the novels of Priest
in Guardian and also in Mo Du
If you've read those two books and you know Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei, Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du
you will know the vibes of those criminal cases in those novels.
It would remind you of that heavily.
These are the positive things about this drama. Now, let's talk about what's not good
and what definitely brings down the rating a lot and to me
makes it not really qualified crime drama, in no way I can compare it to say
last year's Under the Skin, both are two male leads breaking cases police drama
with many unit stories and a main line, think about that.
It's almost exactly the same structure,
but why I wouldn't even compare these two dramas, because in comparison
Under the Skin is based on real things.
They got real cases and they included a very specific profession,
which is the portrait artist which do work in china for real and they are quite legendary,
so that whole story is solidly based on something that can happen and does happen for real.
Whereas this drama when you hear about it's about hypnosis and breaking cases
and criminals who do bad things by hypnotizing a lot of people
it gets into the land of imagination and as the story develops,
you to see that it starts to go out of control
in terms of how much hypnosis can do and then on top of that,
it creates a big boss of the story who is behind all those things from day one.
It feels way too unrealistic, way too ungrounded.
For example, that bad person was pretty much nobody, has no resources early on in the story.
Before this story's timeline started, like a couple of years before,
not so long after he becomes this big boss who owns this big company who has so much money
like where does that come from?
And then once he get there, his actual goal of what he wants to do is
so much like a primary school kid's imagination writing
between classes, they make up their own fiction on their note pad.
You make adults to play that out it's a little bit laughable
and to add on top of all those, is an attempt to make the characters more deeply entangled with each other
than they really are, care about each other more than what you've really built up for, for the two male leads.
So if you watch to the end of episode 16, you'll know exactly what I mean.
There's a big thing that happens in the drama.
And you totally see that it's a trick because there's another eight episodes you know left.
So it's definitely not gonna be that, but because you know all that is coming.
And also just the moment when it happens,
it doesn't quite make logical sense why the two characters would be
one reacting in that way, the other one doing the things he does.
It's so hard to not spoil it for you, but still actually trying to make my point cross.
You're sitting there, and you're like, ~~~ you don't have to, you don't have to go that far.
It's a little bit overkill.
At that point the drama stops and you have to wait for a week for the next episodes to show up.
You already know this drama has tipped a point where it no longer is that believable
And it impact syour, for me,like shipping of the coupling.
It makes that no longer valid.
And as if that's not enough, they would even add a little bit more ridiculous plot
till the very last one two episode where they have this classic scene of because they are two leads.
They go in themselves without support, or like they know support is coming,
but they just can't wait for the big team to come and all the people come in,
They have to do it themselves first and then they've solved all for the crisis on a rooftop,
it's just so classic of any crime dramas.
Then you hear the siren and all the ambulances and the police are coming.
I'm like, come on,it's 2023. Can you just like not do that? It's so not making sense,
They even had this one plot of, okay, I'm gonna spoil it for you here,
which is Zheng Yecheng's character, who is not a professional policeman,
who's never been trained as policemen, who definitely doesn't have a license for a gun
who'd actually pulled a gun out and shoot a guy where he needs to hit that person at a very accurate specific point,
otherwise hit that person other places. It would not work for your purpose.
He has to be a sharp shooter in that 1 second, and he did it.
Somehow~
first is never gonna happen in China for real for somebody who's not a policeman to be able to do that.
Guns, even for policemen in China is heavily heavily, tightly controlled.
You can can't just pull a gun out anytime even when you are a policeman who has the right to bear arm.
By that point, a whole story just completely crashes.
I feel really bad. that all the actors on the set, the bad guy,the good guy on the rooftop,
they're t just playing their heart out, they're being very good.
But the whole setup is so unbelievable that as an audience you just feel so bad for all the actors.
Pretty much from episode 16 onwards to 24,
it's just like a cascading disaster of things no longer making sense, worse and worse.
If I ever get the time, I probably will go and check out the original novel,
because this drama version has a lot of changes made.
The original story is definitely a sexier one, one thing, the Lu Fengping role Zheng Yecheng plays
is a much darker, not so cute and lovely character.
He is the semi good semi bad person who has a very clear motivation of why he does the things.
And he doesn't quite care about what is the standard morality.
And I also believe in the book, LFP actually has multiple identities.
The role that you see him playing in this story and the name he has is a fake name.
He has a different name, and he definitely did some plan,
which I think is why the drama also used that plot.
But because the background story got changed, it no longer makes sense.
He did something to basically slip out of the whole thing, pretending that he's dead,
but he's not and he has actually different identity and he exits the story.
The original story is in many ways, much darker and more interesting.
And this author's work actually has been made into dramas previously and it's still the Luo Fei role.
But in the very almost parallel universe timeline,
it's played by Guo Jing Fei, I mean in an ideal world,
you'd hope that these dramas can connect and it can make sense
and they can actually give back the original character their
complicated and much more flavorful background story and character than the
cutified, If that's a word, version you see in the drama Desire Catcher.
So that's everything I have on the drama Wu Mian Zhi Jing, Desire Catcher.
hope that's useful for you to decide whether you should go and check out this drama.
To me personally, I definitely got more editing material of ZYC in contemporary clothing.
I've already collected all the clips I need for any future edits, if I ever make them.
I think that's the best value of this drama to me, still waiting for that drama whenever that comes
to make him jump another level up.
I hope it happens sooner for him.
And I also hope my channel exists long enough to see that day coming.
Thank you for watching AvenueX, i'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.