Money Heist Korea – Joint Economic Area: Episode 1 (First Impressions)

by DaebakGrits

Netflix’s latest drama drop is a remake of the popular Spanish heist series, and the first episode is jam-packed with world building, character introductions, violence, and twists. It seems like it’s off to a good start, but is it binge-worthy? Well, that decision will likely be determined by your personal taste.

Editor’s note: Coverage will continue with a second comprehensive review, so please refrain from discussing any plot points beyond Episode 1 in this post.
 
EPISODE 1 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Set in a fictional near-future when North and South Korea are still navigating the political, social, and economic ramifications of their recent reunification, Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area turns out to be a very literal — and excessively long — title for our latest drama. The Joint Economic Area (JEA), a city constructed on the site of the Joint Security Area (JSA), was built as a symbolic hub for citizens of North and South Korea to work and live in harmony. The JEA is also home to the Unified Korea Mint, the setting of our heist — but first, some backstory.

It should come as no surprise that corrupt and greedy individuals found ways to exploit poor North Koreans migrating to the south, and among those North Korean hopefuls looking for a better life is our narrator, later identified as TOKYO (Jeon Jong-seo). When she moves south, she’s swindled out of her money and finds herself working demeaning jobs in order to pay back a dirty, sexist loan shark… until finally she has enough.

See, Tokyo may have grown up (secretly) dancing to BTS music — just like any other K-pop fan from around the world — but she’s a member of more than one ARMY, having also served in North Korea’s military. She expertly eliminates the loan shark and steals his money, and for the next year she becomes a Robin Hood-like character, stealing — and killing — criminals who have been exploiting and scamming North Koreans.

Eventually her own crimes catch up to her, and she finds herself injured, on the run from the police, and ready to end her life to escape everything. That’s when the PROFESSOR (Yoo Ji-tae) recruits her to be a part of his team of ragtag criminals. Their goal: steal 4 trillion won from the Unified Korea Mint.

In addition to Tokyo, we’re introduced to the Professor’s other seven recruits as they each select a city-based codename to maintain their anonymity. There’s RIO (Lee Hyun-woo), the energetic computer hacker with the looks and lovability of a K-pop star, but with the supposed dance moves of a Muppets character.

MOSCOW (Lee Won-jong) is a former miner who can dig through anything, and his son DENVER (Kim Ji-hoon) is a street fighter who selects a city near the Rocky Mountains because Philadelphia, the actual setting of his favorite movie Rocky, is too hard for him to pronounce. NAIROBI (Jang Yoon-ju), the crew’s obligatory sex-pot, is a counterfeit artist, and brothers OSLO (Lee Kyu-ho) and HELSINKI (another Kim Ji-hoon) are a pair of former gang members who provide the muscle.

And finally, there’s BERLIN (Park Hae-soo) who, according to Tokyo, has a knack for making people feel nervous. Given that he escaped from the Kaechon forced labor camp, which is infamous in North Korea for having no survivors, it’s logical to assume his polished outward appearance hides a dangerous side.

Five months after the Professor’s crew is formed, we cut to the Unified Korea Mint, where it appears business is as usual. We’re introduced to CHO YOUNG-MIN (Park Myung-hoon), the Director of the Mint Bureau, and we learn rather quickly that he is a grade-A scumbag.

His obvious prejudice against North Koreans didn’t stop him from manipulating his office girlfriend YOON MI-SUN (Lee Joo-bin) into thinking he would divorce his wife and help bring her family south. When she tells him that she’s pregnant, he claims that he had a vasectomy and calls her a whore because the baby can’t possibly be his. Something tells me he’s a big, fat, gaslighting liar, though.

While the rest of the team hijacks the incoming shipment of currency paper and infiltrates the Mint Bureau in disguise, Tokyo and Nairobi enter through the front door wearing wigs and carrying duffle bags full of guns. Once inside, our team of robbers round up all their hostages and blindfold them, but Tokyo has to hunt down one missing person in particular: ANNE KIM (Lee Si-woo), one of the many students on a field trip to tour the Mint Bureau.

Tokyo locates her in the women’s restroom, where she snuck off to Facetime her American boyfriend on (what appears to be) an iPhone 11… in the year 2026(ish). If the presence of an (outdated) iPhone — instead of a Samsung — wasn’t an obvious enough of a clue at this “K-drama” was produced by an American company, then surely the clumsy dub-over of Anne’s English dialogue during her bathroom cyber flirtation was a dead giveaway.

With the hostages subdued and under Berlin’s watchful eyes, Moscow, Denver, and Rio work to unlock the safe. Once it’s open, they celebrate like Scrooge McDuck and roll around in the giant pile of money, but eventually they have to get back to business and commence the next stage of their plan: intentionally set off the Mint Bureau’s alarms and wait for the police to arrive.

Four of the robbers stage an attempted escape, which leads to a real shoot-out with the police. It is during this altercation that Tokyo hints — for the first time — that she may have been remiss in blindly trusting the Professor and his plan. A flashback to when Tokyo taught Rio how to shoot a gun shows him questioning her trust, and at the time, she’d called him immature for not understanding. In the present, though, she acknowledges the Professor’s insistence that no one would get hurt (by their hands) didn’t account for the fact that the police would not be operating under the same idealism. Was this failure the result of his poor planning or a strategic omission?

Rio is shot, and as the four robbers retreat back inside — as per their original plan — they drag him with them. Thankfully, Rio’s bullet proof vest protected him from serious injury, and given that he still has the energy to flirt with Tokyo, he’ll live to maybe die another day.

With the leaders of both nations now aware of the attack on the Mint Bureau, a joint task force is created to handle the situation. CHA MOO-HYUK (Kim Sung-oh) is a former special ops agent dispatched from the north, and SUN WOO-JIN (Kim Yun-jin) is a South Korean negotiator. The two of them are immediately at odds with one another, as Moo-hyuk is of the mindset that they should go in guns blazing, and Woo-jin has to coolly remind him that they have more than 50 hostages to account for — or did he forget?

Back inside the locked down building, the robbers have passed out matching jumpsuits and masks to all the hostages; they are now dressed like the robbers. Rio’s also hacked the Mint Bureau’s phone line, so when Woo-jin calls to negotiate, she’s patched through to the Professor, who uses a voice distortion software while he strategically feeds her false intel and pretends to be one of four hapless robbers whose plans went awry.

Moo-hyuk latches onto the news that there are only four robbers and prepares his team to raid the building. No one in the testosterone-filled command center wants to listen to Woo-jin when she cautions that the guy on the phone could have been lying about the number of robbers. Instead, she’s forcefully removed from the task force and told to go home, but after checking her texts from her new boyfriend, she decides to meet him at his cafe.

It’s at this point that we discover that her lover is the Professor, who she knows as Sun-ho. See, while the sexist members of the joint task force assumed Woo-jin was appointed as the negotiator because her soon-to-be-ex-husband is an influential South Korean politician, the reality is that the Professor strategically made her the best candidate for the job by exposing her competitors’ scandals. Part of his heist plan hinges on her aiding in their operation without her knowing it.

Case in point: when Woo-jin texted him that she was leaving the scene and headed to his cafe, he knew it was a sign that the North Korean operatives had gained the upper hand and would be storming the castle soon. The Professor used this knowledge to warn his team on the inside, so they — along with their hostages wearing matching masks and jumpsuits — were stationed at all the entry points when the task force breached the perimeter with cameras to assess the situation.

At the same time, our robbers release a public Youtube video of Young-min and Anne begging the joint task force not to shoot because the hostages are wearing the same disguise as the robbers. This video serves three purposes. First — and most obviously — the task force now knows they cannot shoot willy-nilly into the building. Second, Moo-hyuk and his trigger-happy team will face public backlash if they act irrationally and cause innocent casualties. And finally, it serves to identify Anne, the US Ambassador’s daughter, as one of the hostages.

As the Professor planned, the soldiers retreat, and Woo-jin is called back to the scene. With the task force unable to gain entry to the building without endangering the hostages, our robbers have bought themselves enough time to complete their real mission: using the Mint Bureau’s equipment to print 4 trillion in untraceable legal tender.

As far as first impressions go, this one was pretty solid, even if this show does fall in line with Netflix’s other “K-dramas” and provide us with another gritty, violent story beautifully packaged in the streaming platform’s big budget cinematography. Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area was successfully strategic in revealing bits and pieces of the Professor’s plan to the audience through intermittent flashbacks, and overall, I felt engaged with the heist aspects of the story and with the individual characterizations of our ensemble cast.

While Tokyo, as the sometimes narrator, was the most featured robber, I’d say all the members of the crew got just enough screen time to get a sense of their general personalities and build interest in their backstories. And on the opposing team’s side, we got a solid introduction to Woo-jin, another strong female fighting for respect in her male-dominated profession. While some of Woo-jin’s lines felt like they were pulled from a textbook on how to portray badass women characters, I think her relationship with the Professor will add an intriguing layer of vulnerability to her personality, depending on how their story plays out. Either way, I’m also eager to see how she fares against the Professor in their cat-and-mouse game.

While I do have a lot of praise for the first episode of Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, it must be acknowledged that this isn’t your typical K-drama, as most of you already suspect. In a lot of ways, it feels like another Squid Game, and not just because of the brightly colored jumpsuits and masks. Or because it stars Park Hae-soo. Or because it prominently features a female character from North Korea…

I mean, there’s all of that, too, but more generally both dramas are claustrophobically suspenseful — primarily confined to one setting and dripping with the unsettling feeling that eventually one of our favorite characters is bound to die. So if you weren’t a fan of Squid Game you should probably avoid this one. And for those of us who choose to proceed, let’s all hold hands and hope that the adorable Rio makes it out alive.

 
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