Song Joong Ki Joined The Mob! [Vincenzo: Premiere Review]

I’m gonna make you a KDrama you can’t refuse.
Hi everyone. So today I’m going 
to be talking about Vincenzo,  
episode one which just premiered on Netflix today.
It stars Song Joon Ki and that’s why I’m watching  
it, because I love him. And wow! I had no 
idea what the show is about apparently. 
All I knew going in was that Song Joong 
Ki Vincenzo who was a consigliere for  
the Italian mafia. That was the entirety of 
what I knew. And so, that’s like the first  
15 minutes of the show and then it becomes 
more of like a treasure retrieval situation  
with like a money pit building thing.
Okay. So hold up. It starts in Italy.  
The head of Vincenzo’s family has just 
died and Vincenzo is wrapping up some  
inter-family business and the guy who is taking 
over his family, who is sort of like his brother,  
tries to kill him. So he decides to 
peace out of Italy, head back to Korea,  
find some gold that’s hidden in a building 
that he knows about, and then leave for good. 
That’s the setup for the show, which is a 
pretty straightforward setup, honestly. And  
the – the thing that really made me go like, ‘Wait 
wha?’ was the tonal shift when

he left Italy. 
So like the first half hour of the show, he’s in 
Italy and it’s like beautiful sweeping Italian  
landscapes. It’s got that mafia vibe. It’s 
really serious men in suits, it’s explosions  
and gunfire, and very like mob story.
And then he gets to Korea and it’s like a  
comedy all of a sudden. It was the weirdest 
tonal shift I feel like I’ve ever experienced. 
When we come to Korea, we meet our female 
lead and her name is Kong Cha Young and she  
is an attorney working for a pharmaceutical group.
So they’re drawing a very early parallel between,  
like, her being a lawyer for 
this evil pharmaceutical company  
and him being the consigliere for the mafia.
So like they’re both lawyers for big powerful  
money things that care more about money 
than people and her father is a lawyer  
who cares about people so – lawyers everywhere.
She’s great! She was so much fun. I had no idea,  
I didn’t know who the female lead was, I 
didn’t know who was playing her, I didn’t  
know what the character was, I knew absolutely 
nothing about the female lead of the show.  
And she’s just, she was so likable. She’s 
like dancing because she did well at her job,  
and she’s like talking to herself all the time, 
and she’s got this, like, just fun effervescent  
vibe that was super, that was immediately likable 
even though she’s doing shady stuff. Like her  
first scene is her, like, paying off a guy to stop 
him from testifying against her pharmaceutical  
company. And in that scene, she’s who you like. 
Like, you know, like, you’re not feeling bad for  
this kid who she wants to pay off you’re like, 
‘Oh god, she’s fun. Let’s hang out with her.’ 
And almost in her next scene, she was 
fighting in court against her father  
which is how he got introduced to his character.
He seems to be the third big character of the  
show. He is a lawyer of the people. He is like 
the guy who wants the right thing and he has a  
lot of tension with his daughter over that.
So that’s a fun dynamic too and it was  
fun to just have two lawyers, a father and 
daughter, on opposite sides of this issue.  
That was, that was a fun scene as well.
So I, that was, she was really fun and I’m,  
I like her. I liked her character immediately 
and I’m excited to see more of her and I’m  
excited to see her with Song Joong Ki 
because they’re, that, that’ll be fun. 
He goes to this building where he knows there’s 
all this gold hidden underneath and he wants to  
get the gold is essentially his whole thing. And 
he meets everyone, all the all the people who have  
uh businesses in the building.
So he meets the tenants of the building and it’s  
like this wacky collection of quirky characters 
who all hate the building owner who he’s with. 
Like, I don’t even, I was so taken aback by the 
tone of of how things went in this building.  
The, like, kooky dance guy and the angry 
laundromat man and the fake Italian  
restaurant guy.
Like they were  
honestly just this side of cartoons. Which is not 
what I thought this show was going to be like. 
I’m a little bit flabbergasted, honestly, by the 
tone of the show after he got to Korea. It just  
was not what I was expecting. It was so odd to me.
I, I mean, I’m, it’s I don’t – like there’s no  
like or dislike yet it’s just sort of like I was 
surprised and I’m now imagining that we’re gonna  
have like a found family situation. 
That we’re gonna have like all these  
this, you know, kooky collection of 
characters coming together to help him – he  
needs to reclaim ownership of the building 
because the pharmaceutical company did some  
shady stuff to get ownership away from the guy 
Song Joong Ki was with for most of the episode. 
So by the end of the episode, his guy 
has lost ownership of the building. 
Also, was killed. That was 
another weird tonal thing.  
Evil pharmaceutical company tortured this guy’s 
family and then ran him over with a truck. 
And honestly – that shocked me too 
because we were in the land of, like,  
weird kooky characters and then a guy who 
was, like, kind of just the most even keeled,  
flat guy got ran over by a truck.
That was, we were everywhere,  
we were everywhere in this first episode.
And I’ll, I’ll be honest, I like not knowing  
where things are going so that was fun. I like 
being, like, wait, what? I, I like that feeling. 
I can’t judge yet whether it’s quality or not but 
it was fun to have no clue what was gonna happen  
next because I had none. And I still have none. 
So yeah, the first episode of Vincenzo, I think my  
general review is like what a surprise.
Like, what, wow that’s not what I thought  
was gonna be happening and I’m really 
curious to see where we’re heading from now. 
Is there still going to be mob stuff involved? 
Like is he just going to now be a guy in Korea  
who like occasionally curses in Italian? Who 
wants to find – like is it going to be a heist?  
Like what is happening now because the mob doesn’t 
actually seem that relevant to the current story. 
Are they going to come after him? I mean, I 
don’t, I, I have no idea where we’re headed. So  
I’m happy about that and I’m going to keep 
watching it. I’ll watch Song Joong Ki in anything. 
I will watch all 16 episodes of the show even 
if it turns into a heap of unpleasantness.  
So it doesn’t matter to me if it’s good or bad, 
honestly, I’m gonna watch it either way. But  
what I have to say about it will definitely 
be affected by whether I like it or not. 
So that was episode one of Vincenzo! If 
you haven’t checked it out yet – do. It’s  
weird. It’s like way weirder 
than I thought it would be.  
I’m looking forward to episode two. 
That’s all I have to say about that.  
If you like KDramas and you like listening to 
other people ramble about them please consider  
subscribing. Thank you so much for watching. 
Have a great day and go watch some KDramas!
And that he played a – uh  
I’m going to do Italian and Korean uh consigliere 
consigliere cong si consiglier. I’m Italian…

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