Like most people I have fond memories of the movie Robocop and there have been quite a few films and series that have taken on a similar plotline. I like the idea of a revenge-oriented crime thriller and I was excited about this series. Unfortunately this series falls into the same trap that a lot of Korean series end up in, in that they spend entirely too much time on the story and the whole thing ends up being kind of boring because of it.
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Seeing as how I already said "Robocop" you can probably guess that the main protagonist is a guy who is brutally attacked by some mob boss and left for dead. His wife is killed in the process and he is presumed to be dead as well. The main boss of the baddies is responsible and rules Seoul with an iron fist and is above the law which is very typical of Korean revenge/action films.
When he is rebuilt by the scientists he and a number of other cyborg type folks are somewhat supernatural in their abilities such as strength, speed, and things like heightened eyesight provided by fake robotic eyes. The technology is fun and interesting but the spent waaaaaay too much time focusing on these skills because of the fact that they needed to fill up 16 episodes each of which is an hour long.
The story begins with an elite police officer who is charged with bringing down a large criminal enterprise named Argos. Due to the progress that he is making he is attacked in his home and his wife is murdered in front of him and then he is stabbed in both of his eyes while his wedding video is being played in front of him. The brutality of this sequence leads us to believe that we are in store for a gritty and gory action-fest. Unfortunately this first 20 minutes of episode one is not a fair representation of what the rest of the series is going to be like - which is what so many series, Korean or otherwise end up being like.
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Instead of just getting on with it, we are treated to 3 hours of development scenes where the main police officer now turned bionic is developing his skills and training with other people who have some sort of bionic help in their abilities. The idea is likely to familiarize us with all the strengths of the characters involved, but the end result is something that you are likely going to walk away from and this is represented in the dramatic drop off of viewership that was seen in the ratings for the show in South Korea.
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The episodes where it appears that no one watched the show is of course not correct, but you can see that there was a definite downward trend in the amount of people that were interested in seeing this show and I would be very surprised if there ends up being a season 2.
Another issue that they will likely face if considering making another season is that the production value of this show is actually really good. The fight coordination and special effects are all pretty solid, and this is never cheap even in Korea where they seem to use their budgets very wisely.
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While entertaining to a degree, Rugal is plagued with the same problem that i find with a lot of series and in particular ones that are aired on network TV in Korea: It's simply too long and filled with a lot of unnecessary dialogue that has to be in there in order to make all 16 of the episodes an hour long. By the time that I gave up around episode 5 very little had actually happened and it was extremely predictable where the story was going. The evil faction Argos has a seemingly endless amount of "red shirt" soldiers and it just stops being interesting seeing our good guys repeatedly beat them all up time and time again. There simply isn't any intrigue or twists at all because you can see right from the start exactly where this is all going to end up.
The boss of the gang eventually loses his arrogance and is in fear as he sees that his enterprise is crumbling and lo' and behold, he eventually is defeated I would imagine - I can't say for sure because I didn't watch the entire series but come on now, we all know that is where the show was heading.
Should I watch it?
I can't think of any particularly good reason why you should to be honest. I tend to like shows that aren't predictable and get on with the story rather than dragging it out for the sake of filling a certain number of episodes. This series goes exactly the way that you think it is going to and at no point in time did anything happen that I couldn't see coming from a long ways away.
Basically it is "good guy wronged, good guy gets means to have revenge, good guy gets revenge." This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't spend 16 hours on a story that could have easily been done in 1 and a half hours. I hate filler and this series is absolutely loaded with it. Therefore I consider it to be one of the worse Korean series I have watched in quite some time.
