Review | What to stream this weekend: Disney+ K-drama Han River Police follows cops on Seoul’s main waterway
- Kwon Sang-woo and Lee Sang-yi star in Disney+’s action comedy about police on a Seoul waterway. But it never found its feet, so will there be a second season?
- Meanwhile, Apple TV+’s Bowie-infused season 2 of Invasion gives us a good look at the space crafts carrying Earth’s alien colonisers as their assault continues
Straight from its launch, Han River Police (Disney+) seemed to drift into the doldrums of indecision, or even an identity crisis.
Billed as an action comedy, it was too short on laughs to be funny and too short on intrigue and action to be a thriller. Nor did it have the necessary slapstick buffoonery to qualify as farce.
With its initial, six-part voyage now complete, it remains to be seen whether the show will sink without trace or take another punt up Seoul’s main arterial waterway (no, not the Cheonggyecheon Stream).
The river police constitute a division (which squabbles with the South Korean capital’s main force) dedicated to ensuring safe, public enjoyment of its beat. Its main members have to remind themselves, often, of this commitment, lest it interfere with their real interest: eating out and drinking, with a sideline of worrying about the consistency of their office-cooked noodles.
Kwon Sang-woo is grouchy Sergeant Han Du-jin, partner of work-shy whinger Lee Cheon-seok (Kim Hee-won) and junior officer Kim Ji-soo (Shin Hyun-seung).
Hanging around them is Corporal Do Na-hee (Bae Da-bin), from another unit. She tries to give frosty Du-jin the glad eye, usually when she’s drunk, while remaining steadfastly unimpressed by Ji-soo, who idolises her.
There’s not much tension in the relationships and even less comedy.
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Perhaps that’s supposed to come from an ex-colleague turned part-time crook, or the continuing storyline about a river cruise ship that runs aground and triggers an emergency response – even though it looks within paddling distance of the shore and no one aboard is in any real jeopardy.
No one, that is, except the hapless captain, who incurs the wrath of Go Gi-seok (Lee Sang-yi), heir to corporate riches and a sneering brat implicated in political corruption pertaining to riverfront exploitation.
Gi-seok would at least have vile anti-hero potential – had he, too, not been scuttled by such a confused production.
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Ground control to Major Tom
David Bowie – Starman, Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust himself – might have considered it the ultimate realisation of his work.
Communication with aliens is finally achieved in Invasion (Apple TV+) – to the tune of Bowie’s Space Oddity. An astral obsessive and talisman in the lives of astronaut Hinata Murai (Rinko Kikuchi) and scientist Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna), Bowie would have been thrilled by his tangential role in interstellar relations … even if our colonisers are savage, blade-wielding, murderous monsters.
Series two gives us – at last! – a close-up of the aliens’ suburban-sized craft, an entire fleet of which is parked around Earth, deploying “troops” programmed to slaughter humans.
Looking like Sputnik with extra legs, each acrobatic, growling menace overrunning the planet gives Homo sapiens a big gulp of their own foul medicine: the rest of the animal kingdom must have felt the same way when we arrived.
All science fiction is ultimately a comment on our own status; and in its echoes of Covid-era Earth, with its deserted streets and rotting rubbish, Invasion is no different.
And although it doesn’t feature warp speed, transporter rooms or lightsabres, it does have a couple of characters who can communicate (after a fashion) with the enemy, one of whom (Yamato) doubles as a street-fighting Molotov cocktail chucker. She might have led a guerilla unit in Tom Cruise’s 2005 adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
Invasion also offers a fully global perspective on a planet under attack, the action taking place more or less simultaneously in Osaka, Brazil, Paris, Oklahoma, London and other places. The World Defense Council is our response coordinator, which clearly has a severe problem, Houston: each new burgeoning, rat-ridden refugee tent city looks even worse than Glastonbury.
