This show was anticlimactic for me. And it was surprising and disappointing because I had a vague idea of how passionate people were about it.

To start things off, while there is a resemblance to City Hunter in the beginning the two shows are not similar. Healer is not a revenge drama. I don't consider it thriller and I struggle to call it action for reasons I will get into later. If I have to choose a genre other than drama, it felt like a Mystery-Comedy-Romance-Drama.

I found the story and plot to be pretty strong. There were no glaring plot holes that I remember and situations were handled realistically (I'm not including the tech and action scenes in this). Unfortunately, that realism might have been one of the issue. Every plot point closed without a huge climax. I want to my heart rate to speed up. I want to feel real anxiety for these characters. I want a sense of catharsis when situations are cleared up. But I never got that. Healer only managed to wring emotion from me twice and both were in the form of tears. The action scenes suffered from a similar problem. They were too sanitized. Too clean. Again, even if I know things will likely be all right for our hero, I want to worry. A show that can't do that doesn't work for me. The last big issue was the lack of comeuppance for some characters. For me, this also fit into the shows realism, but it really sucked to watch as a viewer. It all sort just ended. That's it. Move along.

As for what I did like, the characters were well written and well acted. There was never angst for the sake of angst, something I especially appreciated when it came to the romance. I thought the flashbacks fit nicely. And I enjoyed the general tone. It was funny too. Though often in a quiet way.

I want to give a special shout out to Ji Chang Wook as 'Healer'/Bong Soo/Jung Hoo who was my favorite part of the show. He did a great job switching between characters and I'll be looking out for him while hoping he works on his dramatic scenes. Park Min Young as Yoeng Shin never bothered me, but she's obviously improved a lot since City Hunter and Sungkyunkwan Scandal and it's nice to see. Kim Mi Kyung as Min Ja/Ajumma was also a pleasure to watch and my second favorite. The casting for present and past Yeong Jae and Moon Shik were also great.

I think the overarching themes in this drama are shown in these two lines:

But those people are like zombies. So we have to fight. If we just stay put, we might get bitten and turned into zombies too. - Yoeng Shin to Moon Shik

Media exist to diagnose the pain of this society and cure it. - Moon Shik reading the concept or mission behind Healer magazine

The power of the media and living life honestly and to the fullest. For everything Healer was and wasn't, it did consistently stay true to these messages. And while it didn't completely work for me, it clearly did for others. It's your choice.

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I feel sort of bad giving this a low score. It's an major improvement from all other manga to live-action adaptations that I've watched, but I still don't feel comfortable calling it a good movie or saying that I liked it and giving it more stars.

Aside from being a little old, this applies to Higashide Masahiro specifically, the cast was well chosen and they all performed nicely.

I appreciated this production's willingness to change things around from the manga/anime. It helped a lot. Even so, it feels like there was still too much information and plot lines for a two hour movie. It 's not so much that it felt rushed, but just overly overly packed and that kept me from enjoying it as much as I should have.

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