Lead cast: Sul Kyung-gu, Kim hee-ae, Im Se-mi
Sul’s first TV series, like Song’s, involves a complex political story, although this one takes place in the present, dealing with a battle between the fictional South Korean Prime Minister Park Dong-ho (Sul) and Deputy Prime Minister Jung Soo-jin (Kim).
As the show begins, the prime minister is only a few hours away from being brought in by the prosecutor’s office and charged with corruption.
The president enters cardiac arrest and is brought to a hospital run by the Daejin Group, which is in cahoots with both Soo-jin and the president. Soo-jin attempts to twist the First Lady’s arm into forcing her husband’s doctors to extend the operation so the warrant for Dong-ho’s arrest can be issued before it finishes, but her ploy is foiled. The president drops into a coma after the operation and Dong-ho is made acting president. But for how long?
With its assassination plot and ticking-clock structure, The Whirlwind wastes no time in getting straight down to business.
In doing so it omits many details – such as who these characters are beyond their government posts, and how they all got into this mess – but the corruption set-up is such familiar territory that we can vaguely understand the lay of the land thanks to the well-worn archetypes that the characters embody.
The show begins to fill in some of those details following its initial flourish, most of which are indeed very familiar tropes in dramatised corporate-government collusion.
This forces the story to rely on the big swings of Dong-ho and Soo-jin’s political brawl, which mostly takes place in back rooms and boardrooms as characters plot with one another or trade barbs with their opponents.
What holds The Whirlwind back is that it lacks an element of fun. The proceedings are too dry and stuffed with ham-fisted political dialogue, including zingers such as “politics isn’t arithmetic, it’s math”.
Their latest partnership is a far more grounded affair, but while here they exhibit a different dynamic – in The Moon they played a divorced couple who band together to rescue a man stuck on the moon – their roles fail to stand out from others they have performed recently.
With a pair of disappointing partnerships now to their name, perhaps the problem is that Sul and Kim, both serious and committed thespians, need more colourful foils from which to bounce off.
Much like in those works, Kim’s direction here is clean if unremarkable. The bigger problem with this closed-doors thriller is the bland scripting by Park Kyung-soo (Punch), which is sorely lacking in charisma and political theatre.
The Whirlwind is streaming on Netflix.
