[HanCinema's Drama Review] "My Name" Episode 2

So episode two opens up in the midst of the fight between our heroine Ji-woo and the gang member Kang-jae (played by Chang Ryul). This was a competition, mind you, not an unprompted brawl, with the winner earning a paid vacation. But that ends up not mattering since "My Name" almost immediately and rather uncomfortably segues into an attempted rape. Well, like Moo-jin says, this wasn't exactly unpredictable. Although I was kind of hoping "My Name" wasn't going to go there.

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Not that this really matters anyway. Before too long we're dumped into a five year timeskip. During this time, Ji-woo has undergone more training montages, and apparently completed a full program to infiltrate the police as a member of the Dongcheon Gang. And before we've had too much of that, Ji-woo has run into her father's murderer, narcotics captain Ki-ho (played by Kim Sang-ho) and field investigator Pil-do (played by Ahn Bo-hyun).

To date Pil-do is the closest thing "My Name" has to a mold-breaking character. He's a jerk when interacting with Ji-woo, but we also see him work undercover as an incredibly smug supplier and an aggressively pleasant good cop with other characters. It's hard to tell what's actually motivating Pil-do, and even if he were to tell us, his word is inherently untrustworthy. Pil-do is a far cry from other characters who are so blatantly gangster it's a bit absurd.

I mean, sheesh, exactly how many gangs are there in Busan that everyone needs to be this buff for street fights? Everything about the Dongcheon Gang is just comically elaborate, right down to a staged suicide that involves a guy with a gas mask acting as a strangler instead of just tossing the dude in the car. I'm not totally sure what the Dongcheon Gang's business model actually is, although a tender scene with Ji-woo showing empathy to a drug addict seems to imply it might not be drugs.

"My Name" isn't really about the story so much as it is an excuse for action scenes where Han So-hee looks fairly cool, trying to hit men in their weak spots before they get a second wind. She's certainly a more credible action star than anyone can reasonably expect, given how small she looks next to her co-stars. But the flip side of this is that Han So-hee does a lot more fighting than acting, and "My Name" is most definitely a drama about the former rather than the latter.

Review by William Schwartz

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"My Name" is directed by Kim Jin-min-I, written by Kim Ba-da, and features Han So-hee, Park Hee-soon, Kim Sang-ho, Ahn Bo-hyun, Lee Hak-joo, Chang Ryul. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/10/15~Now airing, Fri on Netflix.