Gong Su Jing Ying (2023)

Great Educational Drama

First off I'd like to say that this is mainly an educational anti-fraud drama. Don't expect action packed drama, sizzling romance, thriller, or any of that sort. If you're here looking for action or romance you will be disappointed. Don't bother watching if you get bored easily at lectures, Reba's character and other characters will try to lecture you in various Chinese laws and saying it out loud many times! Watch this only if you want to learn about Chinese laws and how the people's procuratorate work with the public safety bureau in handling cases. If you like Chinese crime drama, this is worth a shot. This drama has a theme of female empowerment, and like what her character says in the end, there are not many female prosecutors in real life. The drama is mostly told from the FL's pov and she has much more screen time than the ML, her character is powerful, independent, and intelligent.

Reba's acting in this drama is very good, she uses her own voice too. I am happy to see that she took this challenge and performed admirably, and I can't wait for her next upcoming realistic drama which is already announced. In general every actors and actresses perform their job well. The plot is quite interesting, grounded, and realistic, it is not as convoluted or epic like in some fictional detective drama because it is based on real cases after all. However it is not very predictable, and the show will make you keep guessing what each character is actually like. The topic is interesting, cyber crime fraud is a pretty recent phenomenon and there are not many shows that deals with that, compared to more traditional crime such as fighting illegal drugs. While not as epic and deep as those anti-corruption cdramas with high douban rating (eg. The Knockout, In The Name of The People), I think the story is good enough and most importantly, this drama serves its main purpose which is to educate the masses in the form that is more palatable. Unfortunately, this purpose also mean that there are a lot of lines in the script which serve to "educate" the viewer rather than being interesting or advancing the plot, which will bore some viewers.

Domestically this drama is well received, and they are considering a sequel. The MDL rating in this drama is very unfair, and best ignored if you like this genre. There are too many people who review bomb this for various reasons:
- People who only come here for Reba and they can't handle a serious non-romance drama. Serious drama in general is underrated on this site.
- People who watch dramas for handsome young actors. Dramas without good looking actors are also underrated here.
- People who get triggered by the positive portrayal of Chinese government.
- This drama starts slow, and many cases are introduced making it quite confusing in the beginning and therefore people don't have the patience for it. However it gets more interesting after the country F arc and eventually more and more things get clearer.

Overall this drama is not perfect but it definitely is not worse than many of those idol romance dramas with better rating here. Always keep in mind that the target audience for this are domestic audience, not foreign fans.

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Great Acting, Hot Mess in a Dress Script

Watched this to see Dilraba taking on a new type of role and recognized 2 other actors from previous series. Also read the article on this as since this was supposed to be based on a true story of an international cybercrime syndicate. So was hoping for something substantial, what I got was great acting from basically everyone but an absolutely lousy hot mess in a dress script.

Pros: Reba should definitely take on more of these types of roles as she was awesome as An Ni. Very convincing be it in her personal or professional life. As I mentioned in the comments, Han Dong is great at playing an antagonist who makes your skin crawl. From the moment he stepped onscreen, you knew something was off about him. The cast couldn't be better and more professional. That however is where the pros end.

Cons: Fire all directors and screenwriters. What happened here? This had so much promise as a based on a true story series and instead it was turned into an alphabet soup of countries where every European looking actor could speak Mandarin and even the courts looked alike, the costumes were either not fitting or too big and the extras couldn't even hold their props. The story took a nose dive in the single digit episodes. I don't even remember how much went wrong but a lot did.

It ended up being about a genius who was abused and abandoned by his mom with massive daddy issues getting revenge on his father while creating a massive cybercrime network that treated its employees like slaves. He himself was the last person one thought would be the one behind it all; but he did show as a narcissistic sociopath who saw nothing wrong with his crimes and whose manipulative behavior made him fall for FL the prosecutor.

The entire thing was like a bad docuseries that should have been made for Chinese law students because whole episodes consisted of speeches about their law system. Just fast forward because no one outside their country understood how it worked. I have a background in law though in the US and the stuff and the speed they spit things out, you couldn't follow. Also their absolute lack of knowledge of other countries laws that seemed to be important to the main case was laughable. Example: to say that a Chinese attorney who got a J.D. and passed the bar exam in California automatically got onto the US Supreme Court was dumb. Firstly he had to be a federal prosecutor, then go through a boat load of nominations from governor, senators to even have a chance. Also had to be nominated/chosen by a sitting president and pass through the senate or congress. It's a huge, complicated process and they made it seem like by passing a bar exam one can get there.

They remembered it was a drama in the last maybe 6 episodes and started just writing lord knows what in. I literally had no words and wasn't even sure I was going to write a review. Some characters that were constant, just up and disappeared and were never seen again with zilch explanation. Even the ending was like someone drunk wrote it. Frankenstein's monster was better put together than this.

Would I recommend it? No way. If it wasn't for Dilraba and wanting to know who A was and the outcome, I would have dropped it long ago. All of these actors deserve better scripts on these topics.

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