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Korean drama Never Forget Your Enemy follows 29-year-old Ki Ha Neul (Hwang Jun Su), who wakes up after an accident with no recollection of the past ten years. He doesn’t remember dating his best friend, Sae Byeok (Lee Ja Woon), for the last few years. His last memory is from when he was 19, wanting to cut ties with Sae Byeok because he keeps stealing Ha Neul’s girlfriends.

In Ha Neul’s mind, Sae Byeok is his rival/enemy, but what he doesn’t know is that his childhood friend was always in love with him. Between high school flashbacks and a present where he suffers from amnesia, Ha Neul struggles to come to terms with his romantic relationship with his childhood frenemy Sae Byeok, now a successful actor.

The plot is a mix of Japanese romance Jack O’Frost and the Taiwanese drama Secret Lover. While the former is a heartwarming show about an artist who forgets his lover and the two finding their way back to each other, ‘Secret Lover’ revolves around a man secretly in love with his best friend, who keeps dating girls interested in his BFF as a way of keeping his crush single.

Actor Hwang Jun Su who plays protagonist Ki Ha Neul, isn’t very expressive in the emotional scenes and comes across as awkwardly holding back in moments that demand more expressions from him. He is quite wooden in many scenes, stripping ‘Never Forget Your Enemy’ of the emotional impact it could’ve had with a more seasoned actor. Lee Ja Woon on the other hand is more convincing as the dashing Sae Byeok, the ever-patient boyfriend dealing with being forgotten by his best-friend/lover.

Given the amnesia trope, ‘Never Forget Your Enemy’ could’ve easily unfolded like a romantic comedy, but the creators fail to maximize the comic potential of situation. Instead the series piles on serious themes like revenge, obsessive fans, family baggage, hired killers, and what not, attempting to be a bleak drama, without being able to do justice the issues it covers.

Actor Oh Jae Hyeong plays Jeong Han, a young barista at a cafe, with a huge crush on Ki Ha Neul, so there’s also a mild love triangle plot, which just never works. To Jae Hyeong’s credit, he brings a psychotic energy to his character, and had the writers worked on the script, perhaps his sub-plot might’ve been more interesting.

The onscreen chemistry between Hwang Jun Su and Lee Ja Woon as leads Ha Neul and Sae Byeok is quite awkward in the first half of the show, although it does get slightly better in the later episodes. Although the second-half of ‘Never Forget Your Enemy’ becomes less about their romance and more about how a crazy, obsessive fan called Lee SeRi (Park Eun Jo) played a role in He Neul’s accident.

Overall, ‘Never Forget Your Enemy’ feel like a lazy rehash of shows that already exist, but in-case the amnesia plot sounds interesting to you, give it a chance.

‘Never Forget Your Enemy’ is streaming on We TV.

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