Stream It Or Skip It?

In a new South Korean action comedy, angels live in human form on earth, having vanquished evil spirits decades prior. What do angels do if there are no evil spirits to fight? They collect on loans they gave to criminals, that’s what. But what happens if those evil spirits come back?

TWELVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An animation of a zodiac. The animation explains how twelve angels, one for each sign of the zodiac, protected humans from evil spirits until those evil spirits were sealed in the Hellmouth. Now, the angels walk among people in human form.

The Gist: Tae-san (Ma Dong-seok), who is the leader of the group of angels, is also in charge of the Angel Capital Group. This agency, run by the angels, are essentially loan sharks for the criminal underworld. As Tae-san tells a gangster in prison that owes him money, they only loan money to criminals because it’s easier to collect from them. The gangster promises to pay him back as soon as he gets out. Tae-san, sick of dealing with idiots like this, calls the office and tells Jwidol (Sung Yoo-bin), the rat angel and tech expert, to post the gangster’s bail; he’ll get the money one way or another.

Tae-san gets a call from Ma-rok (Sung Dong-il), a police detective that works with the angels; he asks for money, as usual, mostly to buy nice clothes. He brings some of the clothes to Mirr (Lee Joo-bin), the dragon angel, who works at a local museum. She is living in exile, after she says she did wrong by Chief, aka Tae-san.

At the Angel Capital Group’s headquarters, there is also an Oriental medicine clinic, where the doctor, Bang-wool (Regina Lei), who is the snake angel, aggressively snaps necks to cure headaches. The nurse, Don-yi (Ko Kyu-pil), the pig angel, is busy writing fake Google reviews in between chomps of popcorn. He joins Jwidol, horse angel Mal-suk (Ahn Jihye), dog angel Kang-ji (Kang Mi-na) and monkey angel Won-seung (Seo In-guk) to collect money from a gang-controlled illegal casino.

In the meantime, a man named Sa-min (Kim Chan-hyung) seeks out the sealed portal to Hellmouth in order to unleash the evil spirits once again, and ends up releasing the winged spirit named O-gwi (Park Hyung-sik).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Twelve feels like a Korean take on a superhero show like The Boys.

Our Take: Twelve is more or less meant to be a silly, action-filled show that has a lot of hand-to-hand fight scenes and some light humor that lightens up the mythology of the angels and evil spirits. The first episode alone has two extended fight scenes, one where Tae-san takes on the crew of the gangster he sprung from prison, and the other where most of the rest of the angels take on that gambling ring.

The fight scenes are the usual assortment of one or more thug getting knocked out by a strategic punch or kick. And it seems like only one or two thugs take on anyone at the same time. As we usually do when we see scenes like this, we wonder why the thugs don’t jump on the hero all at once. Watching those scenes made us also wonder what actual powers the angels have. From what we see, they know how to land a punch and avoid getting punched, but that’s about it.

But we do like Tae-san’s overall feeling of depression and tiredness, as he explains to his human confidant Geum-soon (Ye Soo-jung), whom he protected from the spirits when she was a little girl. It speaks to the overall cynicism of what the angels are doing in the current day, but all of them will be reenergized when O-gwi makes his presence known.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: O-gwi appears out of the rocks that Sa-min opened up, and spreads his wings.

Sleeper Star: Ko Kyu-pil is funny as Don-yi, who seems to have his own ability to subdue people despite his bulk and his ever-present bag of popcorn.

Most Pilot-y Line: The fight scene between Tae-san and the gangster’s crew is especially strange, given that they only fight him one at a time, and one punch knocks out each of the thugs.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Twelve is a purposely light action comedy that’s not trying too hard to make anyone think. The action scenes could be better and the show could be funnier, but it’s still fun to watch this story of earthbound angels having to fight evil again after a long hiatus.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.