Bloodhounds

Jason Kim’s Bloodhounds is a good action series with a crime story that needed another draft. Its grounded fights are forceful enough to justify the attention, and the programme understands the pleasure of watching physical skill put under pressure. The trouble comes when the writing has to sustain that interest without a confrontation. For anyone chiefly here for the fighting, that is a manageable weakness.

Jason Kim creates, writes and directs, and his strongest work is in the staging. The fights feel convincing because their appeal rests on physical danger, without needing the plot to surprise us first. We were gripped by them because that danger felt immediate, even when the broad direction of the story seemed obvious. An action series has to earn that response repeatedly, and Bloodhounds is sufficiently assured to keep doing so.

Woo Do-hwan plays Kim Gun-woo, with Lee Sang-yi as Hong Woo-jin. Having these two at the centre helps keep the drama approachable, though the writing does not give their characters enough depth to match the attention paid to the fights. We want more to consider between confrontations than what the next confrontation might involve. The performances have to carry that extra interest, and the screenplay leaves too much of the work to them.

Predictability is not automatically a fault in this kind of programme. Familiar crime plotting can leave space for character, or allow a director to build suspense around an outcome we already suspect. Jason Kim’s screenplay does not make enough of either opportunity. Too often, knowing roughly where the story is going also means knowing most of what the drama has to offer, although the action supplies enough pleasure to prevent that becoming fatal.

Eight episodes give a thin story plenty of space in which to look thin. A series needs to renew our interest in its people, particularly when it repeatedly asks us to care about their exposure to danger. Bloodhounds is less reliable at that quieter work. Huh Joon-ho appears as Choi Tae-ho, while Park Seong-ung plays Kim Myeong-gil, but the surrounding drama remains too lightly developed to make full use of the ensemble.

Still, it would be perverse to treat the fights as a minor compensation. They are the principal attraction, and staging grounded action this well is a substantial achievement in itself. The series earns its recommendation on those terms, without having to reinvent crime television. It is entertaining at the thing it most needs to get right, even if the writing makes it harder to remain interested once the immediate danger has passed.

For an action evening, then, this is worth trying with expectations set sensibly. We would happily accept some familiar plotting for fighting this assured, although eight episodes make that a larger commitment than a single film would. If you need the writing to be as sharp as the fighting, choose something else.