A super taxi

So I’ve been watching Taxi Driver.

The title is reminiscent of Time Taxi, a Japanese drama that I watched quite long ago. Both are about special taxis. But the difference ends there.

Time Taxi takes the passengers back in time. In Taxi Driver, however, the taxi is simply a reinforced vehicle, and a group of people in a taxi company are using it for their revenge-on-call service.

Watching the first episode, I felt like it was like Batman (they have a bat-cave! :P ), but with a team which has some people like Professor Agasa (read: inventions!) Lee Je Hoon plays the lead character, the main taxi driver and the one who does all the fighting with the bad guys. Then there is the CEO of the taxi company, who founded the whole revenge service. The others in the team are one hacker (I saw the actress, Pyo Ye Jin, in What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim and liked her a lot, and I liked her here too!) and two mechanics/inventors (these two are technically mechanics because they maintain the taxi, but they also do things like reinforcing the car...which is why I said there are inventions!). All of them are victims of crime in one way or another, so they banded together to help other victims get revenge.

It started off a little boring, and I must say that it had its ups and downs. Some parts were funny and/or interesting, especially where our hero takes on different roles in their revenge projects. Basically they will have clients who have been hurt by people (always criminals), and these clients will call their “revenge taxi” service and tell them their story. Then there is some silly video game thingy where their client decides whether to go ahead with their revenge (what’s more, the cost is not communicated upfront...it’s ridiculous how none of the clients ask about that!)

Anyway, the basic description for this drama would be “ridiculous fun”. There are so many ridiculous things that I will just name the basic few that we always see: The hero is all-powerful and can beat up an infinite number of opponents when needed, but will sometimes get beat up by one lone person. The good guys jump straight into life-threatening situations without any backup plans, and rely on pure luck to stay alive. The bad guys do things without any good reason, except to appear more evil.

Some good things are that the cases don’t happen one by one...they actually overlap (like they should...since one bad guy won’t wait for the other to get caught before they make their move!) I also like the prosecutor who is chasing after these revenge service team. And of course...the most “fun” part is seeing Lee Je Hoon transform into different characters (dorky teacher, money-loving employee, gentleman gangster…) for their different projects.

All in all, from beginning to end, it was fun and interesting at times, but had me groaning from time to time. So, nice but not that good.