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Shut Up: Flower Boy Band korean drama review
Completed
Shut Up: Flower Boy Band
0 people found this review helpful
by michelleoc
May 15, 2023
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 9.0
Story 9.0
Acting/Cast 7.0
Music 9.0
Rewatch Value 5.5

I didn't expect to like it as much as I did!

This drama is a high school, rock band, coming-of-age, first love, unrequited love, bullying story. This drama encompasses a lot, but not a lot happens. What the drama DID show, however, was to show us the power of friendship and found family. We've got multiple hot-headed teenage men, that tend to speak with their fists, rather than using their words. The drama also did a good job of displaying class differences, removing the struggling young men from their known environment and plopping them into a high school of rich, privileged people. I especially loved how, though, rich, the privileged band members' friendships were superficial, based only on what each individual could get for themselves. Our main band members might not have anything of value on the surface, but they had an overabundance of love, trust, and support for each other, and that was wonderful to watch.

Though Lee Min Ki was not one of the lead characters, he was excellent. He's very charismatic in this. Sung Joon as Ji Hyuk - was thrown into being the leader of the group as a necessity. He thinks of the group as a whole, but often felt overwhelmed with the responsibility. Sung Joon's acting was intense and brooding. There was a "heaviness" (for lack of a better word) about him, like he had the weight of the world upon his shoulders. Jo Bo Ah as Soo Ah was beautiful, of course, but I didn't love her character that much for most of the drama, I felt that she was using both men, in a way. And I just have to mention Lee Hyun Jae as Do Il - first, he's gorgeous and with his long hair he really stood out from the others. I liked his quiet presence, often the voice of reason in volatile situations. I felt that the girl playing Soo Ah's friend was seriously overacting, which was jarring when everyone else was doing such a good job.

I was bothered by the two sidekicks of the privileged band leader. The first one was SUCH an over-the-top bully, there was a secret that needed to be protected, and he never was held responsible for his bad behavior. The other bespectacled sidekick was just creepy to me. Flat affect, never showing any emotion, he didn't look or behave like someone that would have hung out with the other two.

The romance was somewhat lacking, I felt, possibly by necessity. There was an overabundance of "I like you, no I don't, I want to be with you, don't talk to me" in a few of the episodes. But the focus was not meant to be the romance, it's all about the bromances.

I'm not a head-banging, rock music lover, but I enjoyed all the music in this show.

And this drama had one of the best endings I've ever seen. With the way that things were going, I was afraid that the end was going to be kind of bland, but we get to see a little more into each young man's hopes and dreams, and we get to see them all together, and anytime they were all together, that was when the drama really shone.
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