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Dare to Love

Love Me if You Dare is one of the few Chinese drama series I've enjoyed, so I thought it deserved a write-up on the blog. This is a mystery/romance/psychological thriller with some glaring flaws, but it has some merits that make up for those, and overall doesn't seem like a Chinese drama at all.

The series begins when Bo Jin Yan (brilliantly played by Wallace Huo), a criminal psychologist specializing in profiling serial killers, returns to China from the US after nearly becoming a victim of a cannibalistic killer. He needs a translator and a personal assistant, so his best friend and techno wiz Fu Zi Yu (Yin Zheng) hires Jian Yao Yao (Sandra Ma), a young, intelligent but naive recent college grad, to work for him for about a week before she starts her new job in the city.

While cold and unfriendly, Jin Yan soon learns he cannot do without Yao Yao, and so goes to great lengths to convince her to become his permanent assistant. Meanwhile, young teenage boys start disappearing, and Jin Yan is called in by the local police to help out on the case. That case leads to another and then another, and Jin Yan discover that someone is orchestrating the cases and stalking him.

There's a lot to like about this series, but the reason I kept watching was Wallace Huo, who is completely convincing as a Sherlock Holmes-style detective but with some terrific differences. Slightly less convincing was Sandra Ma, but she's so cute and likeable in her role you don't mind. Yin Zheng could have been a third wheel while playing the Watson role but managed to hold his own as a buddy and a genius. Add a talking AI car, some very sophisticated plotting and a major final twist, and you have a pretty absorbing series.

The series does have some major problems with the script writing and the secondary cast. The series goes back and forth between China and the US, and I'd say the biggest head-scratcher is the ability of every English-speaking actor to instantly and perfectly understand Chinese, and all the Chinese actors understanding English in the same way. Everyone talks to each other in their own language, and still understand each other, which is pretty ridiculous. Also, most of the actors portraying Americans spoke with heavy non-American accents, so casting dropped the ball there.

I think the story would have worked well for me, too, if not for the final resolution. I don't want to do any spoilers, but it just seemed tacked on so they could do another three episodes. Also, the romance (which could have been pretty great) was a bit tepid and (at times) silly. I even thought Wallace Huo rolled his eyes a few times, trying to portray the character as written.

If you can overlook the problems, then Love Me if You Dare is a decent series to watch, and Wallace Huo an actor to follow. Available on Viki.com.

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