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"Family Outing" Episode 16

"Family Outing" Episode 16

The storyline is mostly simplified here. We have the core of the family unit generally arguing about the extent of Joon-hee's betrayal, and this is for a time interrupted by the marriage considerations of Dong-joo. While the advantage of this more streamlined storytelling is that it's fairly easy to figure out what's going on, it does lead into another rather awkward problem. I genuinely just really don't care.

Consider the whole separation of Joon-hee from the rest of the cast. While it's obvious that we're supposed to view this dramatically in terms of whether or not they'll get back together again...Joon-hee does seem to be doing mostly all right on her own. The inheritance scam quickly falls apart without her continued cooperation. The only person who really seems all that broken up about Joon-hee's disappearance is Dong-seok, as is noted by the fact that everyone else is perfectly fine switching gears to Dong-joo's marriage.

The issue with Dong-joo's loveline is that really is about the most vanilla marriage conflict plot imaginable. There's barely any reference to Dong-joo's unusual familial inheritance situation. It's just, she's completely unsatisfactory as a marriage partner...for some reason. Because chaebol families are jerks, I guess. The whole dramatic water insult really comes off a lot better when it involves characters that we actually care about, or can identify on some level beyond the generic. Because of this and other well-worn tropes, the whole storyline just comes off as pointless filler.

But filler for what? Almost nothing is happening. Kkeut-soon does make one ominous phone call, and disappears. If I hadn't been watching"Family Outing"this entire time I'd be completely lost as to what's even supposed to be happening right now. And even understanding the context doesn't appreciably help matters. We are, for the most part, just watching people not talk to each other. That's just not any fun at all.

"Family Outing"seems to be aiming to just be a generic timekiller. We've got loads of character archetypes, loads of plot devices, and loads of conflicts, but there's very little actual urgency involved in anything that's happening. The nicest thing I can write about"Family Outing"is that it's easy to understand everything that's happening. The trouble is a drama doesn't become entertaining or watchable solely by being coherent. It needs some kind of additional spark. And I doubt very much we're ever going to get that there.

Review by William Schwartz

"Family Outing"is directed byJoo Dong-min, written byKim Sin-hyeand featuresLee Jeong-hyeon,Jin I-han,Oh Sang-jin,Park Won-sook,Jeong Han-heonandPark Joon-gyoo.

Source from :Hancinema