Villains

The Counterfeit Coin: The Hollow Mechanics of 'Villains'

The premise of *Villains* comes with its own accidental review built in. This is a show about "supernotes," counterfeit hundred-dollar bills crafted so perfectly they slide past experts and enter circulation untouched. Watching Jin Hyuk's delayed crime thriller, I kept coming back to that image. The series has all the outer markings of prestige television: expensive rooms, brooding stars, glossy lighting, a grave tone. But bite into it and the metal underneath feels cheap.



It also arrives with a lot of off-screen weight dragging behind it. Shot in 2022, the series sat around for more than two years after Kwak Do-won's DUI scandal turned its release into a problem for TVING. That delay leaves a strange residue on the finished product. The show feels haunted by the wait. Jin Hyuk, who has never been shy about movement or visual swagger—*Sisyphus: The Myth* certainly proved that—tries to push energy into every frame. Seoul becomes a blue-black game board full of slow-motion entrances, deep shadows, and aggressively cool color grading. Yet all that visual muscle is compensating for a script by Kim Hyung-joon that never figures out how tension is actually supposed to accumulate.



Yoo Ji-tae bears the brunt of that problem as J, the criminal mastermind at the center of the series. Yoo has the right instrument for this sort of role: a commanding frame, a voice that can sink into menace, the kind of stillness that can make a room nervous. We've seen him use those tools beautifully before in *Vigilante* and *Money Heist: Korea*. Here, though, the writing keeps insisting on J's brilliance without ever dramatizing it. Instead of showing him outthink anybody, the show fills scenes with other people murmuring about how formidable he is. In the second episode, for instance, he supervises the fake-money distribution by standing at a rainy window in an immaculate suit while a henchman explains the whole plan out loud. He barely moves a shoulder. The effect is meant to be chilling. Mostly it feels inert. The *South China Morning Post* had it right when they said the series is "missing the crucial, hard-to-replicate pieces that define" this genre.



Other actors fare better because the show at least lets them get a little messy. Lee Min-jung, back on television after five years, gives Han Soo-hyun a frayed, brittle intensity that makes her easy to watch. There is a nice little moment when she studies a newly printed supernote through a magnifying glass: her breath snags, her hand quivers for a split second, then she sets the tool down with forced control. You understand her fixation even when the revenge plotting around her grows overcomplicated. Kwak Do-won, meanwhile, plays detective Jang Joong-hyeok with a kind of panting desperation that almost overwhelms the role. The fatigue in his performance feels eerily close to the off-screen reality looming around the production.

I really wanted this one to work. Financial-crime cat-and-mouse stories are a nice break from the usual parade of serial killers, and the ingredients are all there. But *Villains* ends up chasing paper with characters who feel just as thin. Maybe that comes from the delayed release and whatever reshaping happened along the way. Maybe it was broken from the script stage. Either way, the lesson is the same as it is with counterfeit money: perfection only holds until somebody takes a closer look.