Vincenzo
“Episode 20”, Season 1 Episode 20
Requested By
What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s a Korean drama about the mafia, from what I glimpsed involuntarily while clicking through. I’ve never heard of it before.
Recap
The opening credits show a hitman and a golfer in silhouette; none of them are translated.
A man pulls out a gun and shoots at another man - but a woman is in the way. The bullet enters the back of her shoulder, and she collapses, the soundtrack proclaiming her death.
The gunman looks horrified at what he’s done. But he cocks the trigger - despite the pleas of a third man, bleeding from the side of his face - and aims to fire again. Bleeding Man jumps up and grabs the gun. They struggle over it, Bleeding Man wishing that Gunman had never been born, until Gunman shoots Bleeding Man through the stomach.
Gunman’s intended target doesn’t do much during the fight except cry out the names of Gunman’s victims. That’s useful for me (I learn that the woman is “Ms. Hong” and Bleeding Man is “Han-seo”) but not so useful when it comes to saving their lives.
After Bleeding Man falls, Target moves to cover Ms. Hong, who suddenly seems not-quite-dead yet. Luckily for them both, Gunman is out of bullets. Gunman flees, jumps off a balcony, and runs to a waiting car, which drives away.
Target rushes over to Han-seo, who calls him “Vincenzo”. Han-seo expresses gratitude that he was able to help someone for the first time in his life, and gives Vincenzo his phone: “You know what to do.”
The soundtrack goes a little bit too strong on giving Han-seo a hero’s sendoff. If he’s been a villain throughout the series, and only now changed sides, how sorry can we really feel for him?
Elsewhere, Gunman stops his car at the docks and throws his gun into the water.
Much later, Ms. Hong wakes up in the hospital, Vincenzo beside her. She doesn’t blame him for getting shot.
They agree that once he’s done with [whatever he has to do], he should leave immediately without calling her again. This isn’t played vindictively or angrily but heartwarmingly; the vibe is he needs to stay away from her to keep her safe.
The next morning, a glasses-wearing woman wearing a prison uniform reads a newspaper headline: “Babel’s Chairman Jang murders brother and attempts to murder a lawyer”. She curses out Vincenzo.
So this seemingly gives me the name of the last of the four characters in the opening scene: Gunman’s name is Jang. I say seemingly because I’m not really sure this is talking about the same person; the gunman didn’t really have the look of a chairman of a large corporation.
In a run-down office, a group of people discuss what happened. They can’t believe that Jang fired a gun1 but now he has nowhere to run and we finally have a way to defeat him.
This scene is odd, out of place. It has a comical air about it: the characters are speaking at a faster pace, with exaggerated facial expressions and hand motions. One character even leaps forward and pulls another’s hair for no apparent reason. If I were watching it in isolation I’d swear it came from a preteen comedy - not from a gritty Mafia story with actively bleeding gunshot wounds.
Meanwhile, Vincenzo delivers the phone and a disk-on-key to a tech expert. The phone needs to be unlocked, and the disk-on-key contains the “Guillotine file”, which needs to be delivered to “Drector Tae”. The tech expert calls Vincenzo “Consiglieri”, and Vincenzo orders him to use the file to destroy his enemies directly rather than delivering them to the judicial system.
Elsewhere, a man in a wheelchair is being advised to sign a plea bargain admitting to embezzlement and burglary. Before he can sign, however, he gets a call from Vincenzo: “Let me tell you how to survive. Within three hours you have to get Choi Myung-hee out of prison.” The man objects, rising to his feet.
But Vincenzo shuts him down. He lists various places the man has been for the last two days: I could have killed you at any time. But I won’t, and I promise not to if you get Choi out of prison. The man agrees, and tears up the plea bargain. I don’t see the connection yet…
Shortly afterwards, a prosecution team is serving a warrant on the Wu Sang law offices, and Choi, the woman in the glasses who cursed Vincenzo, is being released. The explanation: the prosecutors raiding the law office have discovered that Jang actually committed the crimes for which she is in prison, and she merely took the fall for him2.
Vincenzo calls Choi. She answers, but all she hears is the recording of Vincenzo telling Not Wheelchair Man to get her out of prison. After the recording, Vincenzo congratulates her on “your last day”. Does he mean “your last day in prison”? But he sounded more sinister than that, as though he got her out of prison so he can kill her…
As Choi drives away from the prison, a car follows her. The driver calls Vincenzo to report that she is headed for the law offices. When she gets there, she extracts a phone hidden in a statue with a note that says, “call this number when you’re released”. She calls, and Gunman Maybe-Jang answers. They quickly establish that Vincenzo is using her to try to find Maybe-Jang, so they shouldn’t meet in person. So instead she needs to go get his laptop and bank passwords, in return for which he’ll send her 5 billion [currency not stated], while he stows away on a ship to Mexico.
Meanwhile, Tech Guy calls Vincenzo and gives him a cell signal to follow; I don’t yet know if this will lead him to Choi or to Maybe-Jang.
Elsewhere, Not Wheelchair Man is surrounded by reporters asking for comment as he enters a building.
He explains that while he is the head of the Wusang law firm, and that Jang used to be one of his clients, they haven’t worked with him in some time. And besides, all the evil things Jang is accused of were actually done by Choi!
This of course violates his agreement with Vincenzo. And soon enough he gets a phone call. A voice says, “You should’ve stayed respectful”. He panics, looking around for a sniper - and misses the man who runs through the gauntlet of reporters, stabs him, and flees. And while everyone’s attention is on this assassin, a second one stabs Not Wheelchair Man, this time from behind. The assassins jump in a van and get away.
Now, I assumed they were working for Vincenzo, based on the fact that he just violated what Vincenzo ordered. But just then Vincenzo pulls up in another car and watches him die, looking disappointed. The panicking reporters finally give me his name, Han Seung-hyuk3, and refer to him as the Chief Prosector, which I don’t understand. How can he be Chief Prosecutor and also Jang’s lawyer.
That evening, Vincenzo and his friend track down Choi and dispose of her security. He tells her the money she tried to transfer on Jang’s behalf has been intercepted and transferred to a “good cause”. She asks for permission to finish a beer before he kills her; it pleases him to deny her request.
In the police department, two officers provide some exposition4. Han (the dead Chief Prosecutor) is the former CEO of Wusang, which is not a law firm. Jang is the current CEO. And Choi is Jang’s lawyer.
Speaking of whom. Choi wakes up to discover that she is tied to a chair in what looks like an attic. Her feet are bleeding to prevent her from standing up. And Vincenzo is there, patiently waiting. He tells her that he won’t let her die comfortably. She plelads with him: What will my death accomplish? It won’t bring peace. I'll just be a scumbag killed by another scumbag, i.e., you.
Vincenzo isn’t impressed with being called a scumbag. He opens a valve that controls a sprinkler over her head. Her reaction is unexpectedly severe:
Vincenzo puts on some music. She pleads more: You always say you don’t harm women and children! “I don’t see you as a woman, but as a monster.” She begs for him just to shoot her.
Belatedly5 she realizes the water wasn’t water, but gasoline6. He walks off and tosses a cigarette lighter over his shoulder7.
On his way out, Vincenzo calls Mr. An, the tech guy, for an update on Jang. Mr. An says Vincenzo is too far away, so he had to send a separate team: namely, the clowns from earlier. The clowns reach the docks shortly after Jang and his henchmen, and a brawl erupts. The henchmen are defeated handily, and one of the clowns, “Mr. Lee”, gets Jang in a chokehold, but Jang stabs him and pulls out a gun.
Before he can fire, Vincenzo arrives and shoots Jang in the legs.8 With the fight over, they call 911 for an ambulance to treat Lee.
As he lies dying, Lee asks Vincenzo two favors: don’t hand Jang over to the police but rather punish him yourself, and be my daughter Dal-rae’s godfather when she is born. Vincenzo agrees on both counts.
The other clowns, suddenly in serious mode, bring a medical kit and start giving Lee first aid. They hear sirens approaching - but suddenly one of them realizes, “That’s not 911, it’s the police!”
Now that’s a statement that took me a few moments to puzzle out. The intended meaning is this: we called an ambulance for Lee, and assumed the approaching sirens were those of said ambulance. But they’re actually the sirens of police cars, looking for Vincenzo, and he needs to flee9.
Vincenzo leads the police on a short-lived chase, which ends when the clowns use their car to block the cops’ path. They get out, begging for help for their injured friend and pretending they don’t know what they just interrupted10. As Vincenzo drives away, he calls Ms. Hong, in the hospital, to deliver the news: he got away and has Jang with him, but Lee is… they don’t say his fate.
Later, Jang wakes up strapped to a chair, much like Choi did and possibly even in the same room. Jang asks how he found him, and a flashback explains:
Jang’s brother, Vincenzo’s friend, told Vincenzo about how Jang gave him a watch as a present. Which was so uncharacteristic of him that he had to disassemble it to see what Jang was up to. Turns out it contained a tracker. So as revenge, Jang’s brother put trackers in all of Jang’s watches, so he could find him the next time he disappeared (the last time being after Jang committed a bunch of murders in middle school).
Vincenzo lays out his plan: this chair is attached to “The spear of atonement”, a drill that will move forward in 5mm increments every five minutes. It will take hours and hours before it reaches Jang’s lungs and kills him, throughout which he will be in excruciating pain. Jang tries to offer a deal, take all the money I have and even cut off one of my limbs, but Vincenzo isn’t listening. He grows more desperate: just shoot me, end my misery, don’t torture me like this! But Vincenzo tells him to apologize to his dead brother, and leaves11.
Vincenzo pulls out his phone and prepares to call Hong, but decides not to at the last moment. He shuts his phone off and tosses it aside.
In an abandoned field, Vincenzo meets with Mr. An and a random other person I don’t recognize. They tell him that Director Tae, whoever that is, has linked Vincenzo to a false identity, but only for the next 30 minutes, so he needs to have already boarded his flight out of the country by then12.
Just as he is about to leave, Hong arrives. Despite their agreement, and the fact that she shouldn’t be moving given her injuries, she still wants to say goodbye face to face to say goodbye. They embrace. Mr. An drives Vincenzo away, and Hong sobs.
Sometime later, the sun rises over Jang in the warehouse, nearly dead. A crow lands on his chest.
In the denouement, a woman gives a presentation in a vineyard: the visitors can buy or rent a row of vines and tend to them themselves. The signs establish that one row belongs to Lee Jin-A and another belongs to Vincenzo. One of the women in the tour group, who I think was part of the clown crew, tells herself that says she’ll tend to both rows and try to make wine.
A year later, in the denouement, a bunch of things happen that I don’t understand at all:
A bunch of teenagers are messing with each other. One of them looks at the news on a billboard: Jang’s company, Babel, has entered receivership.
A political candidate, “Kim Seok-u”, makes a speech opposing some kind of development project. The clown crew show up and start chanting “Cassano” at him. I don’t get it.
… Is it? I would be very surprised if this were true. Kim Seok-u threatens to call the police. They say they’re not afraid of the police and roll up their sleeves to prepare for a brawl. Won’t the police care about that?
There’s something about a woman being arrested for being witness to a murder or something I don’t understand. Hong and the woman trade barbs, both of them having temporarily reverted to twelve years of age.
Director An is looking for Vincenzo but hasn’t found him.
Lee survived, and he and two other members of the clown crew run a pawn shop that gives overly generous estimates to anyone who claims to be a student.
A girl sits playing piano complains that some of the notes don’t work. The piano’s owner offers her another piano in the same room. Turns out the notes don’t work because the owner is hiding something in the piano, which is blocking the hammers from hitting the strings. Which is a very stupid way to hide something: “Come and notice that something’s wrong here!” We get a glimpse inside the piano but I couldn’t tell what it was.
A couple gets married in a Buddhist ceremony. The priest flashes back to when Vincenzo asked him for advice on what to do about his sins and his inability to change who he is as a hitman. He is told that he’ll never be like Buddha, but he can take the role of [something else in Buddhist tradition, that I didn’t understand].
The denouement ends, but the episode doesn’t. Hong receives two things in the mail: a postcard from Vincenzo, one of many that all show the same island (gosh, I wonder where he is?) and an invitation to a celebration of Korea and Italian relations (gosh, I wonder where he’ll be?). She wants the guy she’s working with to come with her, but he has to go to a… paper… airplane… competition…. I’m not going to ask.
And indeed Vincenzo meets Hong at the gala. He has arrived as part of the Italian delegation, the only way he can sneak into Korea. But he invites her to his island, the one in the postcard. It’s named “straws”; earlier we saw her drinking a can of beer with a straw, so I assume there’s some kind of connection.
As they talk, there’s a flashback to a bed that has bars of gold laid out in rows instead of mattresses, with four different characters taking turns hiding the gold there. I have no idea what’s happening.
The flashback ends, and Vincenzo and Hong kiss.
As he leaves, he gives a voiceover: I still kill people; I still don’t believe in justice. Even villains want to live in peace, so I makes peace my own way. Evil is “vehement”.
Unresolved questions
What are they going to do with all that gold?
We didn’t actually see Jang die; he was still barely alive. Is it possible he survived? If not, how long until his body is discovered?
What’s going to happen with the development project?
Will Hong move to Vincenzo’s island? Will they be together?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 5/10. A coherent story with some interesting complexities; it deserves a 6, but a couple of plot holes bring it back down to the average-for-television score of 5.
Writing: 4/10. The writers seemed of two minds as to what kind of story they wanted to tell. On the one hand, you have the gritty tale of a cruel and vengeful Mafia hitman, unable to control his bloodthirst but barely able to guide it in a direction that satisfies his twisted approach to what justice means. On the other hand, you have a crew of 20-to-60-year-olds prancing about and putting each other down in ways that the characters in Mean Girls would deride as childishly beneath them.
Each ‘half’ of the story seemed perfectly coherent and acceptably written. But I got whiplash each time we switched from one mode to the other, sometimes in the middle of the scene. The elaborate and silly faux-karate moves that the clown crew did while facing down Jang’s men was followed, only moments later, by one of them getting stabbed in the gut and graphically bleeding out. And then Jang himself is graphically shot in both legs! It’s like they took the cast of a Disney Channel sitcom and plopped them down in the middle of the Saw films.
Perhaps this is something about Korean culture that just doesn’t translate well to American. Since I don’t know who this show’s intended audience is, there are three possibilities:
It’s meant for twelve-year-olds, and Korean culture is comfortable with this level of serious gore.
It’s meant for adults, and the behavior I see as childish is considered perfectly normal.
It really is an experimental hybrid of two clashing tones and just as strange as it seems.
Whatever it is, it didn’t work for me.
Production: 6/10. The acting was well above par (though I’m being generous and assuming the Disney Channel-style acting was deliberate). The soundtrack was pretty good. The translation wasn’t great; the 911/119 mistake was the most prominent but by no means the only error.
Characterization: 4/10. Vincenzo is an interesting character with a unique approach to life that I’d like to explore more.
In fact, he is so interesting and unique that I started to give this a score of 7 on the strength of his character alone. Then I thought about the other characters one by one and realized I just couldn’t justify that high a score. The clowns were, frankly, just too silly, and nobody else’s character was explored much at all.
Accessibility: 7/10. It didn’t take long to get a grasp of the basic plot, and some of the more interesting aspects (why does Vincenzo want Choi out of prison if she hates him?) fell into place pretty quickly. In fact, this could have scored even higher if not for the utterly mystifying denouement.
Closure: 8/10. Whatever Vincenzo’s reasons for pursuing Jang and Choi, they have been fulfilled. He’s now off doing his Mafia thing over in Italy, and his future with Hong is very much still up in the air, but the plot of this series seems to have been resolved.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No. If it were just the Vincenzo plotline, there might have been a chance. But I’m too old to watch teen sitcoms, and the amalgamation of the two genres didn’t serve either of them well at all.
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What was he supposed to do, throw it?
This justice system moves impressively fast!
It’s been given a few times, but this was the first time I was able to absorb it with everything going on.
As far as I can tell this scene is unnecessary. It’s almost as though the writers put it in entirely for my sake.
I’d make fun of her for having no sense of smell, but I don’t either.
It must have taken a lot of time and effort to set up a sprinkler system that would spray her with gasoline. How long was she unconscious? And why not just use a bucket?
Another reason the sprinkler isn’t the best idea: there’s probably plenty of gasoline still in the piping. Vincenzo moseys off as if he’s got all the time in the world, but at any moment the house could erupt in a fireball that lights up the night sky.
He arrives about two minutes after the clowns do. Mr. An has overly high standards of punctuality.
After the episode, I looked up the Korean emergency numbers, and now the line makes a lot more sense. The Korean medical emergency number is 119, while the Korean police emergency number is 112. So the line was probably “That’s not 119, that’s the police!” in the original Korean, and the translator did a bad job with it.
Considering Lee has an obvious stab wound, and there are a bunch of beat-up criminals not a hundred meters away, the police are incompetent not to realize that these are clearly Vincenzo’s accomplices.
Just how abandoned is this abandoned warehouse? If it really takes 12-24 hours for Jang to die, that’s way too much time during which his screams might be heard by someone in the street.
Good luck getting through security in that short a time.