Drama Review: Take Five

Not every thief is a bad guy. Certainly not Take Five, a team dedicated to stealing from the bad to help people. Twenty years ago, the original Take Five disbanded due to the death of a policeman. Twenty years later, the new Team Five assembles and team leader, Homura Masayoshi (Karasawa Toshiaki), is looking for the truth behind the stolen painting that resulted in the death of a policeman. I watched the drama as a Cantonese dub and it was a very good one. The voices synced very well to the video and matched their characters really well.

Take Five is a very well woven mystery within a mystery. Each mystery has something related to the stolen Da Vinci painting from twenty years ago. Masayoshi is a professor at a local university. A mysterious homeless woman shows him a picture of the Da Vinci painting and says nothing more about it. From this begins the various heists performed by Take Five. Their members are Niimi Haruto (Matsuzaka Tori) who works at a security company, Minami Shinichi (Rokkaku Seiji) a dad, Hioka Tamatsu (Irie Jingi) a young man, and Iwatsuki Kai (Inagaki Goro) a cop. In each of the episodes, Take Five steal things that have been acquired through immoral means like funds or secret data. Each member often times disguise themselves as ordinary workers to sneak into workplaces and take advantage of Iwatsuki's identity as a policeman to acquire hard-to-get information.

I enjoyed a lot of their antics and humor in the story. Their various heists use very realistic means and there's some good mystery in it. Towards the very end, there was kind of a twist ending that was a but unexpected. it had me going "Oh my god did he really ....!" The character relationships were very well written like the betrayal of trust between members or the ambiguous hate/love relationship between Rui (Matsuyuki Yasuko) and Masayoshi. I think the most interesting relationship is Rui and Masayoshi. Rui, a policewoman, is chasing after Masayoshi with hate because of the death of her father twenty years ago, but wavers as she begins to question what truly happened. What felt forced in the writing was Haruto's attraction to Rui. I think they wanted to make Haruto a flirty young man, but kind of skewed that behavior to become an attraction in order to show a change in character. I also felt that the writers wanted to pair Masayoshi and Rui together, but then again it felt too forced. The mutual attraction between the two characters is like Tom chasing Jerry slowing becoming Tom letting Jerry go.

My favorite character is Iwatsuki even though Masayoshi is close to being my favorite character. Iwatsuki is a cool and intelligent guy except he's also a bit on the awkward side making it funny to watch. Like when they force Iwatsuki to do the actual stealing, Iwatsuki forcefully refused to put on a disguise or when Iwatsuki is forced to attend a goukon.