He truly loved her, but she betrayed him.
A man who has a promising future ahead of him is in love with a woman who has killed a man, and he takes the blame and has to serve a long prison sentence. When he gets released, the woman he loves has found a new rich old man, and together they have a son. He wants revenge since he sacrificed his future for a woman who used him just to become rich, and he has picked out his target, the rich man’s daughter. She hates her new stepmother but is cold and hard to get along with.
The Innocent Man consists of 20 episodes. In the lead roles, we find two excellent actors Song Joong-ki and Moon Chae-won. These two are great actors, and of course, I wanted to watch this series after becoming a big fan of Moon Chae-won after watching Flower of Evil.
I have to again mention the amount of episodes this series has. It’s about five episodes too much because the series feels like a long boxing match where the so-called good guys have a long match against the bad guys.
In the good guys’ corner, we find the man who loved the woman who betrayed him and the stepdaughter of the woman they both hate. They also have in their corner a lawyer with a heart of gold, which feels like a fantasy character. In the evil corner, we find the evil power-hungry woman from hell and Satan himself—her lawyer. And he is even worse than her. The actor is solid as hell. He has one of the most punchable faces ever! He is stone cold, and he doesn’t have a soul in his empty body. The actor is creepy as hell!
Two characters get too much screen time that I didn’t find interesting: the sister of the man who is out for revenge and his best friend. These two are not interesting, they behave like children, and there are too many episodes focusing on them. They don’t contribute much to the plot. If these two characters hadn’t gotten so much screen time, the series would have been about five episodes shorter, which would have been great for the pacing.
Every time the evil characters believe they have won the fight, the good guys stand up in the last second after taking a hard punch to the head and punch back. This goes on for a very long time. It’s entertaining at the beginning, but unfortunately, this series keeps repeating this process.
But after a while, it becomes more interesting because the evil woman is a messed-up character who still loves the man who hates her. She tries to get him back because she can’t let him go, but she is corrupted inside and out. Because of her betrayal, the man she loves has become a con man. He is using the stepdaughter to get his revenge, and the problem is that the stepdaughter falls in love with him for real while he doesn’t know who he is anymore. You understand why the man is out for revenge, and you never feel that he is a rotten man. But it’s not nice of him to use a hot woman like the daughter, who starts opening up to him, which she hasn’t done for any man before.
The acting is, for the most part, solid, but I had some problems with the actress who plays the evil stepmother, Park Si-yeon. You can hear the way she speaks that she isn’t that good of an actress because she is too dramatic in conveying her emotions. But she has some moments where she shows talent, especially when she is hurting deep inside her soul. You see in her eyes and face that she is hurting because of who she has become. But in the start, she is a character you will hate every second she shows herself on the screen. She isn’t an intelligent woman and has just used her beauty to get to the top. She tells us several times that she will do anything to stay at the top because she is not going back to live in the gutter anymore.
If you miss those old soap operas that are somewhat predictable and have that ugly digital look that I’m not a fan of, then I think you are in heaven if you want to watch The Innocent Man. But like those old soap operas, The Innocent Man repeats too much of the same things and it should have spent more time on the last episode and ending. I’m not a big fan of the ending since it felt rushed. There are several important threads that the series and the last episode should have spent more time on, but instead, it just shows us some scenes of how it went for the characters we followed, and after that, it just ends. That left a sour taste in my mouth. It was way too short to end this long revenge and romantic journey.