Netflix’s new Korean crime thriller series My Name is filled with well-choreographed fights, the best of which is when Yoon Ji-woo takes on the entire Dongcheon gang on her way to deal with Choi Mu-jin. My Name is the story of Yoon Ji-woo and her quest to find her father Dong-hoon’s killer. Choi Mu-jin, who was like a brother to Dong-hoon, takes Ji-woo under his wing and makes her part of the Dongcheon criminal organization. Ji-woo does everything to survive, including learning how to fight with strategy and intelligence under the tutelage of Mu-jin.
Indeed, the many fight scenes in My Name showcase Ji-woo’s skills with hand-to-hand combat, melee weapons, and guns. These skills progress quickly throughout the series. An earlier scene of Ji-woo fighting her classmates as a young girl showed she already had incredible skill in that area. With her natural aptitude combined with Mu-jin's teaching, by the eighth and final episode, Ji-woo is at the peak of her fighting abilities.
My Name culminates in the scene where Ji-woo finally confronts Mu-jin for his lies. But before that, Ji-woo makes her way up to Mu-jin’s office, battling her way through the best of what the Dongcheon organization has to offer. This long fight sequence in the ending of My Name is the best one in the entire series. Unlike the rest of Ji-woo’s fights in which she hesitates to kill, Ji-woo has no qualms about dishing out death after she finds out the truth about her father. Moreover, this fight also sees the culmination of everything that Ji-woo has learned about fighting, from her days at the Dongcheon gym to when she fought gangsters as an undercover police mole for Mu-jin. Featuring clever fatalities that combine hand-to-hand striking, gunplay, and knives, Ji-woo tears through the well-dressed Dongcheon henchmen inside the luxurious hotel that serves as the organization’s headquarters.
While there are many other notable fight scenes throughout My Name, none of them compare to the epic brutality of the Dongcheon hotel fight. Even the final showdown between Ji-woo and Mu-jin, which is more crucial to My Name’s neo-noir storyline, is more about reckoning and revenge than violence. Meanwhile, although the scrap between Ji-woo and Do Gang-jae at the Dongcheon gym is impressive as well, it lacks the knife work, gunplay, and sheer scale of the injury that Ji-woo dishes out against the Dongcheon henchmen. In a series that’s filled with incredible fights, it’s not surprising that the best one is found near the finale.
My Name is indeed the most violent K-drama to come out in 2021, and it is definitely not for the fainthearted. However, for fans of violence, crime, noir, and drama, My Name expertly does it all. The way the fights are choreographed is not only a testament to the dedication of My Name’s cast and crew, but it also helps in viscerally establishing the world of crime and revenge that both Ji-woo and Mu-jin struggle to navigate.