Le Coeur Embrasé (2021)

I paid to watch THIS?

I want to be charitable because I showed up to support Gong Jun, but...I cannot. (For much more enjoyable uses of your time that also include his face, I’d recommend Word of Honor, Begin Again, or The Love Equations). This was just a gigantic mess. At first, I was having fun with the zany editing and lackluster plot/characters, but by episode nine, it wasn’t campy in a good way anymore. I watched subsequent episodes on 1.5 speed and fast-forwarded through most of them anyways.

I’m not sure where to begin, except that in so many ways, this was a sub-par version of You Are My Hero, like the comments say. The male lead in one of the civil protection agencies, the female lead a doctor, even the same plot near the beginning of the male lead’s team having to teach the female lead’s team something to do with emergency procedures.

The pacing was terrible, I’m not sure if it was that the episode count was cut to fit into July’s patriotic drama theme or what; the comments here on MydramaList can certainly attest to the absolutely bizarre editing. There are flashbacks to scenes that actually didn’t occur into the final cut; it’s that bad.

Yan Lan is unbearable, alternating between boring, bratty, and useless. She has a remarkable amount of spare time for a doctor, sitting around her office for most of her hospital scenes. The actress was more charismatic as Chuchu in Legend of Fei, and that is saying something for the writing here.

The “villain” was a shallow creation whose actual villainry was kind of pulled out of a hat near the end.

My biggest letdown was the lack of … feeling for anything. In YAMH, they leaned better into hurt/comfort tropes, and invested time in developing the main couple. They were adorable. In Flaming Heart, everything feels brisk, businesslike, ushered along without any chemistry or feeling, and I never felt a thing for the main couple, nor even the other two hetero couples we’re introduced to. The tropes that do make it in – They Knew Each Other As Kids, His Dad Died Saving Her In A Fire, Oh Look At That We Met At The Same Natural Disaster Rescue Site – are either not given enough time for us to feel something, or we just don’t care either way.

My favorite part was whenever Wang Yizhou’s Li Yan Liang appeared, and the “very good friendship” his character had with Doctor Ji Yuan. I shipped them way more than any of the many couples shoved in our face in this drama.

I was not sad to reach the final episode, it was more a sigh of relief that I was free. I recommend people spend their time watching You Are My Hero or the above recommended Gong Jun dramas instead!

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