Throwing as many similar sounding and confusing names at the screen as the punches and kicks, Mercy for None is the latest South Korean action-crime series to hit Netflix.
Crime organisations Joowoon Group and Bongsan Group co-exist in harmony following an incident that split their original gang Beomyeongdong a decade ago.
After Joowoon’s leader Lee Joo-woon (Huh Joon-ho) names Nam Gi-seok (Lee Joon-hyuk) as his successor, the move sets off a cascade of events that lead to Gi-seok’s brutal murder, which in turn brings his older brother Gi-jun (So Ji-sub) back to Seoul.
Formerly the best fighter within Beomyeongdong, Gi-jun carves a path of revenge looking for his brother’s killer, which eventually causes an all-out war between Joowoon and Bongsan, with various factions attempting to use Gi-jun’s return as the fuel for their own ambition.
Uninhibited testosterone
Mercy for None has it all: good-looking South Korean men from the baby faces up to the gruff, more masculine variety, men in suits, spoiled Gen-Z brats as the kids of crime lords, dirty cops, foreign hitmen and of course, excellent close-quarters combat with everyone getting slashed, chopped, stabbed, shot, punched, kicked and thrown around.
Choi Sung-eun’s direction leaves little room for anything other than testosterone and adrenaline – to the point that none of the leads even have romantic interests, which makes Mercy for None stick out like a sore thumb from other South Korean productions.
So much of the action and crime noir are thrown at the screen that Sung-eun and writer Yoo Ki-seong seemed to have forgotten a critical aspect that would have made their TV series better: there is no character development.
Action over character development
A lot of time is spent on Gi-jun easily punching his way through groups of people, but there are only a handful of scenes with him and his brother.
They share maybe two big scenes, one at the start and the other just before the final episode ends, with one blink-or-you-will-miss-it scene somewhere in between that reveals Gi-seok wanting to retire from the gang life and be with his brother.
Mercy for None fails to establish their relationship beyond surface-level exposition and in turn, makes it hard for audiences to root for him to avenge Gi-seok or even give him a personality beyond every named and unnamed character going “Gi-jun is a badass” before promptly soiling themselves in fear whenever he shows up.
This same problem extends to the other secondary main characters. The show juggles between so many characters and their myriad of personal motivations that run in tandem with Gi-jun’s revenge plot to the point that Mercy for None has no time to just stay still and let the characters breathe.
In a constant motion of hurtling forwards from one excellent action sequence to another, Mercy for None is a great thrill ride, possibly the best from South Korea among its ocean of generic zombie productions in the last five years, but it simply lacks the oomph factor to become as memorable as the country’s older action productions such as I Saw the Devil, A Bittersweet Life, Oldboy or The Man from Nowhere.
Mercy for None is streaming on Netflix.
