REVIEW: ‘Take Charge Of My Heart’ Wastes Its Charming Leads

Actor Kim Young-kwang is back in the romantic comedy saddle with Netflix Original KDrama Take Charge of My Heart (Nareul Chungjeonhaejwo). After a series of more transgressive, darker roles, actor Kim’s return to the romantic male lead is exciting. But it’d be more so if he had something to work with. 

In Take Charge of My Heart, Kim plays Baek Ho-rong, a chaebol heir with an artificial heart who needs a woman, Na Bo-bae (Chae Soo-bin), to keep it charged. It has everything to set itself up for rom-com success if it stuck to being an electrifying romance instead of diverting its attention to chaebol politics. And that’s where Take Charge of My Heart fumbles its two leads. 

Baek Ho-rang leads the resorts of one of Korea’s top conglomerates. A gifted businessman, he excels at everything and is ultimately the family’s second-hardest worker (only second to his grandmother). With dedication and great promise, Ho-rang is set to inherit the group’s leadership. The only problem is that a childhood illness has left him with an artificial heart, and now he’s waiting for surgery to save his life because of a malfunction. 

Netflix’s latest KDrama starts with a shockingly charming premise and great leads.

Still, worrying about his heart is only part of his conflict, as the vultures he calls aunt, uncle, and cousin conspire to topple his inheritance. But with a power struggle brewing and a heart failing, he meets Na Bo-bae and learns that she’s nothing short of a miracle. 

On her side of the story, Na Bo-bae is a struggling drama writer with a deadline to finish a romance screenplay before her contract expires. While she’s made great friends in the television business (including actor Ji Eun-ho, played by Cha Woo-min, who may or may not have his own crush), Bo-bae isn’t a social butterfly and relies on her family more than anyone else. But that loneliness is intentional.

When Na Bo-bae was a child, she was struck by lightning. That miraculous survival also gave her a peculiar power: she can electrify the people and things around her. With electrical currents coursing through her body, she can’t touch other people. As Bo-bae begins to understand how to control the intensity of the shock she releases, anyone she touches gets shocked. 

While she uses it to defend herself from being grabbed more than once, Bo-bae can’t form the kind of relationships she wants. A simple hug, a peck on the cheek, or even holding a hand is a dream, and so she turns to writing. Only, how can she write a good romance without ever experiencing it herself? 

After an unplanned meet-cute and an accidental kiss, Ho-rang and Ba-bae’s paths collide, and she doesn’t shock him. In fact, Bo-bae is the answer to his problems. In an unplanned move, he offers her a contract she can’t refuse: he gets a portable charger for his heart, and she gets a man to go on dates with for “research.”

Relying on an old, tried-and-true contract-relationship formula, Take Charge of My Heart starts off extremely promising. The series takes a bond between people pulled together by circumstance and need, and grows it into romance.

When it comes to the romance, Take Charge of My Heart works. Unfortunately, by halfway through the series, the showrunners got more interested in checking off every trope on the genre checklist than in telling a good story. A miscommunication with the second male lead, a kidnapping plot, a political maneuver for an inheritance that also involves attempted murder, an arranged marriage, blackmail, and superpower issues bog down the story. 

Take Charge of My Heart is unfocused and messy, but Kim Young-kwang and Chae Soo-bin try their best. 

Take Charge of My Heart is only watchable by the end because of how charming its leads, Baek Ho-rang and Na Bo-bae, are together. Still, Kim Young-kwang’s Ho-rang is hard to get behind when he’s alone. With little real character growth (other than realizing he can actually fall in love), Chae Soo-bin’s Bo-bae carries the series’ emotional weight. She’s fiery, she’s not one to be taken advantage of, and she’s a fighter. 

Bo-bae’s spark is both humorous and endearing. She breaks the expectations of KDrama rom-com heroines without being entirely transgressive. If anything, she’s the foil to the woman she writes about in her dramas, but that fire and self-respect are genuinely refreshing. Actress Chae’s performance steals every scene. Her clumsiness, naivete, but more importantly, her instinct to get out of bad situations make her a standout. 

At the same time, while I have enjoyed all of actor Kim’s darker roles in series like Trigger and Somebody, he struggles here. It’s not that he isn’t capable of charm; he oozes it. But the character he’s portraying is so thinly written that his performance has to do a lot with little. A traditional tsundere, he’s too dumb when it counts. He can’t figure out his emotions, which undercuts the capable person he’s shown to be throughout the rest of the series.

Unfortunately, Take Charge of My Heart’s gimmick winds up holding actress Chae and the rest of the ensemble cast back. At times, the dialogue can be cringey, and the melodrama feels like too much, especially in moments that may have started off as genuinely sincere. And that’s the issue with the series: it constantly undercuts its sincerity with absurdity and doesn’t know when to stop adding inflection points into the narrative. 

The series buckles under the weight of its extensive cast and the need to give each and everyone of them a substantial piece of the main couple’s story. Kidnapping, attempted murder, intimidation, blackmail, embezzlement, and an artificial heart that only this one woman can charge? That’s just too much to balance. 

Unlike melodramas built around that tumult, like Remarriage and Desires, Take Charge of My Heart still focuses on the warm, fuzzy feelings that define romantic comedies. In fact, it’s surprising the series isn’t actually based on a webcomic, given how many quick narrative pivots come out of nowhere just to add more drama. 

Netflix’s Take Charge of My Heart could have been a good Kdrama rom-com, instead, it’s just too much. 

Add in the fact that the lore around Ho-rang’s heart never truly makes sense. While these vaguely fantastical stories can play fast and loose with their rules, here it makes the main couple’s relationship hard to follow. On the one hand, they’re always within a prescribed radius where Bo-bae can charge Ho-rang’s heart without touch, and yet, he’s always on empty.

It would be one thing if Ho-rang told Bo-bae he was getting close to low charge so he could spend more time with her, and he does that from time to time. But the bulk of the time, that’s just not the case. Without a good story or good worldbuilding, the limited series winds up on life support. 

Take Charge of My Heart starts out fun and silly, but winds up being an overstuffed mess of tropes that never truly work together. With too much packed in and little substance, it loses all steam by the midpoint. Ultimately, this series may be best left to flatline. 

Take Charge of My Heart is streaming exclusively on Netflix.