Cheap Love

Japanese Drama

My Score: 7.5/10

★★★★☆

Lead Actors: Sorimachi Takashi Tsuruta Mayu Yoshizawa Hisashi Kurosaka Mami

Episodes: 10

Genre: Romance/Action/Crime

Summary: A straight and narrow girl longs to actually live instead of following along on the easy and “right” path designated for her.
She grows increasingly interested in a nightclub scout, but can’t decide whether to pursue him, or follow the advice of her friends and parents by accepting her boring, but “safe”, arranged marriage.

Review: This drama was almost really good….

I really liked how the lead guy fell for the girl right away. She was the one who rejected and played around with him first, which is not the usual drama formula. However, even though she did that, she didn’t feel like a bad person because it was easy for her to mistaken him as somebody who’d be good for a one-night stand.

The guy is a gangster/delinquent type that has a shady job and deals with bad people. However, he has a heart of gold and believes in true love, (very similar to this actor’s past role in the original Great Teacher Onizuka drama).
The girl is a neat and clean pianist/teacher with a good family and who has never seemed to do anything risky in her life. In fact, she makes it a big deal when she goes into a certain restaurant for the first time.

This pair is so different that you can’t help but wonder how they’ll possibly end up together. However, they have such good chemistry, you really want it to happen somehow.
It’s a bad boy/good girl couple that works really well because deep inside, the girl isn’t the prim and proper type and the guy isn’t all bad.

Even though you might expect this drama to follow the typical cliches that happen with this kind of story-line, like disapproving parents, interfering rivals and yoyo-ing between her arranged marriage and him, it veers off that path into something unexpected.
The second half turned into an action/crime genre as the two main guys try to get out of the underworld scene and into a more fulfilling life.

The young friend/sidekick.

It’s not a comedy, but there was some funny and amusing parts throughout the drama so it never got dark, though it was often gritty.

Everything was going so well in this drama. It was easy to watch and interesting… it was often exciting too.  Unfortunately, the ending was done poorly.

I could understand the message they were trying to get across, but it was done too abruptly and ended up feeling cheesy. They hardly gave you time to realize what was happening before and after. It was more of a climax, and so, had very bad timing to succeed.
Instead of making the viewers feel the way they wanted, it just made me wonder what the point of it was until the very end after the credits, and even then, there wasn’t enough to fully hit home with their intentions.

They could have done it so much better to make the message clearer and the feeling better, (it should have been more bittersweet than cheesy).

BTW, the ending theme song is really good~