(TV SERIES) Twelve - A Rather Disappointing Developed Series for Such an Interesting Premise

When I heard about this series from my wife who saw it mentioned in various social media, I was quite interested to give it a try due to its interesting premise, plus the lead cast of Don Lee aka Ma Dong-seok. However, as usual I wanted to wait till the whole season/series is completed before I started to watch. It just so happen that the final episode was released while both of us were on long holiday. So after watching other series and films, I finally decided to watch three nights ago and finished it last night. All right then, I'll get right with it.

Brief Story Line (warning possible spoiler)

Story was set in the world where twelve Angels were created by God to protect humans. They were given exceptional powers as they had to fight against evil. After the last war centuries ago, the evil was defeated and were sealed in the hellmouth along with the Angels' power making them just like ordinary people. The angels led by their Chief Taesan (Ma Dong-seok - Holy Night: Demon Hunters, Ashfall etc) now worked as money lenders to criminals, along with his siblings that consisted of the rather hot-headed Won-seung (Seo In-guk - Death's Game TV series, Pipeline etc), the one who loved to eat Doni (Ko Kyu-pil - Tarot, The Fiery Priest 2 TV series etc) who worked together with Bangwool (Regina Lei - The Sadness, Port of Lies TV series etc) in oriental medicine shop, tech expert Jwidol (Sung Yoo-bin - Count, No Way Out: The Roulette TV series etc), the athletic Malsook (Ahn Ji-hye - Badland Hunters, Mine TV series etc) and the one who symphatize human Kangji (Kang Mi-na - Love Untangled, Welcome to Samdal-ri TV series etc).

Aside from them, there was also Mirr (Lee Joo-bin - The Roundup: Punishment, Queen of Tears TV series etc) who was working in museum but lived separately from them, and a human with special power Marok (Sung Dong-il - Pretty Crazy, Midnight Runners etc) who worked as Police Detective. Their peaceful life was interrupted when dark priest called Samin (Kim Chan-hyung - Mission: Cross, Link: Eat, Love, Kill TV series etc) somehow managed to resurrect the evil spirit Ogwi (Park Hyung-sik - Juror 8, Buried Hearts TV series etc) and both of them worked together to bring darkness to the world. 

So how would the story conclue? You could find out in this series.

.End of Brief Story Line

With such interesting premise, I would have thought it would be easy for me to truly enjoy the series. However after a promising start, I began to feel that the story telling was not too good. It almost always started with showing some of the final scenes from previous episode continued with glimpses of flashback (or vice versa). Thing is after few episodes, we could have already guessed what happened in the past and it felt pointless to spread them into several episodes. And to make things worse, the final episode started with some sort of brief summary again of the past. I would have preferred to just have one or half episode to show everything and continue with the present

Anyway, aside from those repetitive things, I also felt the angels were written as rather slow in decision making particularly during the fights. One of the weirdest time was in 4th episode where Marok stayed passive where he could have easily did something. But probably that's just me. Most of the time though, the action was actually pretty well executed. The fight scenes were quite fascinating and it was entertaining watching them fight, especially seeing Ma Dong-seok used his exceptional power to fight through so many bad guys and evil spirits. Seo In-guk, Kang Mi-na and Ahn Ji-hye also showed their wonderful agility. The rest were rather so so, with the strangest one Lee Joo-bin's character Mirr who I thought was way too inconsistent.

I read that Ma Dong-seok was interested after reading the early script, so much so that he became the co-writer together with Kim Bong-han and produce the series through his Big Punch Pictures along with few other production companies. It was kind of strange seeing so many of them joined together as the series did not seem to have high production value. The special effects were just so so and the make up department did terrible job of making the cast wearing awful wigs. Btw, the series only had 8 episodes with less than 50 minutes duration (which became shorter due to the opening & closing credits and the repeating of the final scenes). I was surprised to see the ending cause it seemed to hint for future story as I thought this would have been better as a mini series. Looking at the poor audience reception though, I do not think it has any chance of renewal. 

The series really had a large ensemble cast. In addition to the names I already mentioned, it also had few recurring cast and guest stars. Among them were Ye Soo-jung (Project Silence, Dog Knows Everything TV series etc) as owner of the street food stall Geumsoon, Na In-woo (Ditto, Marry My Husband TV series etc) as Hanu, Han Ye-ji (Resident Playbook TV series etc) as Yangmi and several others whom I believed my wife would have recognized as she is a far bigger fan of K-dramas than me. There was a bit of funny thing with the casting of Regina Lei as she is a Taiwanese actress, which would explain the way her character was written.

In the end, I think it was rather disappointing to see such a good premise became wasted due to some poor writing or directing. Aside from some good fight choreography and the pure joy of seeing Ma Dong-seok once again showed his capabilities, I think there was nothing really positive. Luckily I am major fan of action so at least those cool fight scenes were satisfying for me. So if you just want to see some fights and not bothered by anything else, then I guess you could give this a try and might even be entertained. But if you want something really good, then I would not recommend watching this. The choice is yours.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars