Amid the boom in South Korean productions and the superhero genre—which shows no signs of ever going out of style while constantly reinventing itself—Netflix is releasing The Wonderfools, a series that combines the two concepts in a way that surely made someone think, “What could possibly go wrong?” And the answer is: everything.
Kang Eun-Kyung returns to Netflix as the creator of The Wonderfools after having tested the waters of superpowers in the series An Unusual Family, but instead of having her characters lose their special abilities, here they are discovering and exploring them. It’s far from a revolution for the genre, as it touches on many clichés we’ve already seen in productions of this style, with plenty of echoes of X-Men—only here they’re presented without much charm, and not because there’s a lack of comedy.
Just look at the cover of the new Netflix Korean series to realize that the story is going for a very lighthearted tone, and that’s exactly what a significant portion of the show is like. Its leading trio, headed by actress Park Eun-bin, carries much of the narrative and comedic weight, introducing us to a group of misfits who acquire superpowers and decide to seek help from a government official played by Cha Eun-woo—who has already mastered his own—adopting him as their mentor in this new phase of their lives.
This group takes over-the-top acting to ridiculous extremes in their performances—from their gestures to their physicality—relying heavily on slapstick rather than humor centered on dialogue.
The Wonderfools is almost a Marvel series, almost
It’s interesting to learn that this project was originally inspired by Stan Lee’s comics about a second-rate superhero team and the mad scientist who created them, before the producers of The Wonderfools decided to move forward with the series as an original intellectual property. But something of that Marvel influence remains: ambition. Stripped of the edgy humor and constant jokes that dominate the MCU series and films, this show is much more childish, less fast-paced, and features poor visual direction that doesn’t match what it’s trying to convey.
Like almost all productions made today, this one is also dark and desaturated for no other reason than to follow the visual uniformity that Netflix imposes in the technical specifications for the content it releases, so it may be somewhat unfair to blame the series itself entirely, even if it kills its own identity. Perhaps there is also some other excuse to explain its lackluster production design, while the special effects are merely adequate to support the necessary action sequences that become increasingly common as the plot progresses.
There is also a shift in tone, as the introduction of the antagonistic group allows The Wonderfools to create a counterpoint that leans toward drama, while still taking itself more seriously in order to explore childhood experimentation and delve into moral dilemmas and the portrayal of religion. While I mentioned X-Men earlier, given the theme of groups of mutants seeking to build a community, a comparison with Stranger Things—also from Netflix—might be more accurate, since that series similarly grew darker as we discovered that its main villain had also been subjected to torture in a laboratory as a child.
But even with its good intentions, there’s nothing that makes it work. Not even the mix of flashbacks and flash-forwards meant to create complexity manages to make the script surprising, and it’s easy to anticipate the plots it proposes, including the obvious romantic twist in the protagonists’ relationship. Not to mention the inconsistency in pacing, with uneven episodes that drag on longer than they should, culminating in an unbearable finale that runs over an hour and a half, as if it were the third season of Good Omens.
“The Wonderfools” fails to achieve any of its goals—whether it’s to be funny, to be clever, or to make you connect with its characters—and yet it seems Netflix had certain expectations for it, since it at least released it dubbed into Spanish. That said, since The Supergeeks hit the streaming platform last Friday, May 15, with all eight episodes released, Netflix hasn’t managed to get the show to resonate with a global audience, and, for now, it remains outside the Top 10 of the most-watched non-English-language series of the moment. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
