‘GG Precinct’ Netflix Series Review - Get Your Idioms Right

Cheng Wei-hao is a nutty filmmaker. He drives his story with amusing ideas. It doesn't matter to him if he has to change his film's universe, as long as his humor has a loony tunes charge. I confess I don't remember much about Wei-hao's Marry My Dead Body, but I can confidently say it had a supernatural touch. The comedy mystery was about a police officer who gets married to a spirit. That's all I can recollect about Marry My Dead Body. I can vaguely see that scene where the police officer meets the male ghost in the shower for the first time. The point is, if you were to make a sequel/spin-off/whatever to expand the universe of Marry My Dead Body, you would once again cook up or derive elements from the realm of the spirits. This is where Wei-hao subverts your expectations. With the help of Yin Chen-hao, Wei-hao has created GG Precinct - a crime comedy series focusing on goofy, sometimes competent, sometimes incompetent, police officers solving a serial killer mystery. Only after watching the show, when I visited the Wikipedia page, did I realize that GG Precinct serves as a spin-off to Marry My Dead Body. Perhaps, someone who lives outside Taiwan and vividly remembers the 2022 film may immediately make a connection between this series and that supernatural comedy, given Greg Hsu, Gingle Wang, Ma Nien-hsien, and Flower Chen have reprised their roles for the six-episode Netflix comedy.

The more I think about Wei-hao's creations, the more I am able to establish a link between them. Apart from the characters, another common thing between Marry My Dead Body and GG Precinct is the presence of violence that looks cartoonish. Bodies are injured with a shocking, palpable force, but it's passed off as comedy. You don't laugh; you wince. Wei-hao and Chen-hao's sense of humor is not always funny. What they lack is the skill to charge their jokes with comic electricity. More often than not, they let a scene go on and on for such a long time that it loses its energy. The scene where a young Shui-yuan (Tony Yang) is interrogated by the police unfolds so ploddingly that the humor dissipates by the time we reach its climax - the skin-biting punchline. There is also a nudge towards sexism, but it never develops into something meaningful. In fact, such a serious subject takes the fun out of this series. The directors are not good at creating or fleshing out the characters' relationships. Nobody feels connected to anybody. I was never convinced that some of the characters here were each other's friends, relatives, or siblings. This issue mainly originates from the performances, as all the actors seem to be acting in isolation. They don't exist on the same wavelength. Everybody is busy being funny in their own way. And if Wu Ming-han (Hsu) and Lin Tzu-ching's (Wang) decision to take a murderer to a place without an army of officers is meant to be a joke, it doesn't feel like it. You simply mutter, "How stupid."

Yet, despite all the flaws of GG Precinct, you feel inclined to recommend it. Wei-hao and Chen-hao's strength lies in their waggish ideas that prevent the weak scenes from collapsing. The serial killer in GG Precinct just wants people to take idioms seriously. He is a Grammar Nazi. What the killer desires is a world where people take education seriously. At one point, the motivation to commit murder becomes the demand for a five-star rating. When GG Precinct works, it gives us moments like the one where Chief Chang Yung-kang (Ma Nien-hsien) looks confused while his team members use AirDrop technology. There are other good gags that I won't spoil. They don't arrive consistently, but when they do, you cannot stop yourself from smiling. GG Precinct is far from a perfect series. It mostly fails to hit its target, making you wish for a better filmmaking team. Still, whatever pluses it has, they outweigh the negatives. I am eager to see where Wei-hao will put these characters next time.

Final Score- [5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times