Summary
The Tyrant is too depth-averse and unoriginal to be memorable, but it is an action-packed thriller for as long as it lasts.
Netflix’s dominance in the K-Drama streaming market may never be challenged, and despite Hulu and Disney+ (through its international Star banner) having a good go of things, shows like The Tyrant are a good example of why.
That seems like a hyperbolic statement, but it isn’t really. The Tyrant is a perfectly decent show; a dark, action-packed, and blood-soaked good time for the four episodes it lasts. But after those episodes, then what? It won’t become a viral sensation or dominate water cooler conversations. It won’t sell subscriptions, either. After those four episodes are finished, it’ll be hard to recall much of The Tyrant at all.
Am I judging this show by unfair standards? Probably. But it’s also a largely surface-level and uninteresting endeavor at the best of times, so there isn’t much else to discuss. How it slots into the ever-shifting mosaic of contemporary entertainment is perhaps the most interesting angle from which to approach it.
This is because, if we’re being frank, you’ve seen it all before. A powerful bioweapon is on the loose. Two world governments and several of their clandestine agencies are chasing it. There are special agents and mercenaries and safecrackers with dissociative identity disorder (okay, that one’s quite new.)
You get the point. The Tyrant is one of those K-Dramas that abandon a lot of the subgenre’s beloved specificity and instead just emulate more mainstream television very competently. On that note, the cast does a fine job, the gloomy production is appropriately atmospheric – if worryingly underlit at times – and it all looks and sounds and the part.
The Tyrant | Image via Hulu/Disney+
But there’s no real hook. Characters are thinly sketched, the plot is rote when understood and frustratingly messy before it becomes clear, and genuine depth or thematic interrogation is always left by the wayside to accommodate the next big action sequence. Style over substance is a cliché, but nonetheless an apt one here.
It might come as a surprise that The Tyrant is a spin-off of 2018’s The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion and 2022’s The Witch: Part 2 – The Other One, both written and directed by Park Hoon-jung. Some familiarity with those movies will help a little but not a lot since The Tyrant was intended to be enjoyed on its own terms and the connections aren’t terribly meaningful.
Here’s the irony, by the way – I spend most of my professional life complaining about shows being too long, especially Korean shows which boast hour-plus runtimes for seemingly no reason at all, but The Tyrant suffers from being much too short, with only four episodes, each running around 40 minutes. The brevity limits the time and space for character development and makes the pacing too frenetic. The show starts in an incredible rush, stagnates while characters circle the same drain, and then hurries to conclude in a slightly longer finale.
With so little meat on The Tyrant’s bones narratively speaking, the lack of a coherent dramatic throughline makes the whole thing difficult to invest in. It’s a cool way to spend a couple of hours, granted, and it has a nasty streak that helps to set it apart a little. But it’s ultimately a thin and quite meaningless affair that only provides surface-level pleasures.
Maybe the fact it’s only four episodes is a good thing after all.
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