Shot at point blank range, he falls down a cliff, only to wake up all the way back in 1987 in the body of Jin Do-jun, a member of the Soonyang family.
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Seeking revenge and armed with knowledge of the future, Do-jun grows up to become the favoured grandson of Soonyang chairman Jin Yang-chul (Lee Sung-min), despite being the youngest son of Yang-chul’s own outcast youngest son.
What follows is a Byzantine series of corporate takeovers and family back-stabbing. In classic succession drama style, the question is: who will take over Soonyang in the end?
We’ll return to the answer to that question in a minute, but the journey to get there was often an enjoyable one. Song barely breaks a sweat playing yet another handsome mastermind (a debatable label given Do-jun’s oracular powers), but there’s a reason he’s not challenging himself here – he’s fun to watch in these roles.
The Soonyang clan is filled with shameless miscreants who lord it over everyone save for the all-powerful Chairman Jin, in whose mighty presence only do they cower.
They keep using their money and power to get their way but Do-jun invariably thwarts their plans, allowing us to revel in their frustration time and again.
The novelty does begin to wear thin after a while and eventually the show throws us a few curveballs, but this is where it begins to suffer.
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Chairman Jin develops an illness and, after surviving a car crash that was meant to kill him, he develops full-blown dementia and never recovers.
Early in episode 13 the chairman collapses and the story jumps to the aftermath of his death and the all-important reading of his will, from which Do-jun is excluded.
The story jumps back and forth briefly between this and the moments before Jin’s death, but the flashbacks only makes things worse – Lee Sung-min, ostensibly Song’s co-star, has been unceremoniously dispatched from the series.
With three-and-a-half episodes to go, Reborn Rich goes back to tit-for-tat corporate manoeuvring between Do-jun and the Soonyang heirs, but without Chairman Jin looming over them there’s no spark left in these squabbles.
Things come slowly to a head and, at the end of episode 15, Do-jun is once again the victim of an orchestrated car crash, only this time he dies. Furthermore, in his dying moments he looks through the window, only to see himself.
When his eyes open he’s once again Hyun-woo, being treated in a hospital in Turkey in the present, where he survived the attempt to assassinate him.
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Do-jun spent 14 episodes and a few decades formulating his revenge, but in the finale he’s back where he started and nothing has actually changed. It wasn’t quite a dream, as he now has knowledge he couldn’t have acquired otherwise, but it’s not clear what happened and the show doesn’t seem to care.
Hyun-woo turns out to have been an unwitting accomplice in Do-jun’s death. Did he forget about this when he turned in Do-jun? Or did this element of the past change after his experience as Do-jun? If that is true, how did he become the Hyun-woo of the present, who sacrificed his humanity for status within the Soonyang fold?
The questions don’t stop there.
Hyun-woo manages to orchestrate the downfall of the Soonyang clan, doing so with a recording that includes his panicked phone call to a superior after Do-jun’s death and that superior’s chat with Jin Young-ki (Yoon Je-moon), the chairman’s eldest son.
In this recording, which Hyun-woo couldn’t possibly have made, Young-ki very clearly announces who he is.
It’s a sloppy and deeply unsatisfactory conclusion to a series that, in the end, seemed to be at cross purposes with itself.
On the one hand you had the fantastical financial revenge drama about a hard-working salaryman getting back at the powerful corporation he slaved for. It’s an individual vendetta, and Do-jun’s financial trickery satisfies his aims but has a negative impact on many individuals off screen.
This makes Do-jun something of an anti-hero, but it seems like the creators of the show wanted to find a way to make him a morally just character, which is where this slapdash new ending comes in. Hyun-woo returns and his whole time as Do-jun is retooled as a redemptive arc.
But is this true redemption? He takes down the Soonyangs to avenge a fallen member of the clan. Everyone in the working class who suffered at their hands over the decades remains in the same place.
Reborn Rich most certainly did not stick the landing, but during much of its acrobatic jump through the slippery world of finance and moments in modern Korean history, there was much entertainment to be had.
Reborn Rich is streaming on Viu.
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