Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Based on a graphic novel of the same name by Arash Amel from BOOM! Studios, a believed-dead former intelligence operative is forced to come out of hiding to protect his family from the consequences of his past actions.
Whew! We the audience have waited a long time for the severely underrated Daniel Dae Kim to finally get his moment in the action lead, and here it is! The show was filmed entirely in South Korea, is set in various famous spots in South Korea, and boasts some seriously gorgeous scenes of many infamous Korean spots as backdrops for oh so much ass-kickery between warring spies. Make sure your ticket for a train to Busan is all printed, and lets get into this!
So David Jung (Daniel Dae Kim) has been “dead” for nine years and counting. His daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty), only recently legally an adult, has been carrying out missions for CADDIS, the spy-intelligence agency that her father and Juno (Piper Perabo) built together years ago, for a while now. After a mission to kill a Russian intelligence operative where her charming recklessness almost gets her caught, Rebecca finds herself being chased down by an older Korean man who seems disturbingly familiar, and Juno ruthlessly orders Rebecca to take him out. The only problem is, this new target is David, and he’s trying to protect Rebecca from being CADDIS collateral as his former spy collective sends out the hit notice on him.
Admittedly Rebecca has more than a few unresolved traumas and foibles, mainly having to do with the “death” of her father some time ago, but she’s been well trained in CADDIS spy-craft and assassination too, which makes her a very dangerous sociopath David’s trying to corral. It doesn’t help that one of the first things he does after getting himself and Rebecca to a relatively safe location, is drug her, so that he can check on whether or not she contacted Juno and what other surprises she might be carrying on her person, without interference. And while Rebecca proves that she can kick ass and even kill with the best of them, her willingness to fling herself headfirst into any and all manner of highly dangerous if not murderous situations is a direct counterpoint to David’s carefully thought-out stratagems. Then again, David’s had a lot longer to hone his spycraft.
Back at CADDIS, Juno is being plagued by the re-emergence of Senator Dawson (Charles Parnell), who knows her of the old CIA days and knows damn well Juno and CADDIS had some kind of involvement in the death of the Russian operative from the beginning, and also from the incompetence of her own son, Oliver (Louis Landau), who has absolutely no business trying to please mommy in her chessmaster spygame, but would be better served safely tucked away in some sort of British finishing university, playing polo with his mates. Seriously, the boy looks and acts so soft, even as he’s trying to defy the orders of CADDIS operatives, pulling out his own gun, or begging mommy for yet another chance, he might as well be made of marshmallow fluff. Oliver is Juno’s main if not only weakness, and despite being well aware that the boy is about as substantial and tailored to this job as a paper bag, Juno lets him continue to try and work for and with CADDIS as an agent.
Juno thought she had managed to get rid of David so many years ago, selling out your comrades is a time-honored spy tradition after all, but after spending years raising and training his daughter to do the same damn job, she can feel control of Rebecca slipping through her perfectly manicured fingers. It doesn’t help that dear Oliver is insisting he can still be useful to CADDIS as a field agent, despite screwing up every time he does, well, anything outside the CADDIS offices really. Juno makes yet another what could be an ill-advised decision and calls in one of her highly trained assassins, a man called Gun (Kim Ji-hoon), which is ironic because he prefers knives if given a choice in the matter, to hunt down David and his kin.
Rebecca might have been able to keep up with the whole reemergence of her father and the assassins sent by CADDIS to take them both out, but the surprises just keep on coming. Somewhere while David was “dead” and on the run, years ago, he met up with Eunju (Kim Tae-Hee), the two of them got all romantic and married, and had a daughter Minhee Jung (Nayoon Kim). That’s right, Rebecca has herself a little sister who’s less than half her age, and a kind-of-sort-of stepmother that she needs to help protect as well, as David and his now-three women all go on the run!
It’s pretty obvious David’s in-laws, Eunju’s parents – her mother Young Sil Kim (Lee Il-hwa) and especially her father Doo Tae Kim (Sung Dong-il), rather disapprove of his marriage to their daughter. But at this point David has little choice but to bite back his annoyance at not being Korean enough, strong enough, hell really anything good enough for Eunju, and ask her father, who runs a potentially shady shipping business, for help protecting all his family. At first that means getting them all new Visas, but later morphs into grudgingly owing father-in-law some kind of future favor, which even Eunju advises against, and borrowing a small in-law army to take on Juno’s CADDIS agents!
The show does a good job at combining ass-kicking action sequences with therapeutic familial confrontations years in the making, in ways many of us can relate to, even not being highly trained spies and assassins. Never being good enough, is a theme that runs constantly through the show, though with the cliffhanger the last episode left us on, I think it’s good enough for viewers to want to clamor for a season 2 of Butterfly!
Dodge them flying bullets with David and his family, in Butterfly, on Amazon Prime now!