Butterfly Review: Daniel Dae Kim Leads Prime Video’s Slick Spy Drama

It’s less damning than it sounds at first to say that Butterfly never gets better than the action set piece that opens its first episode. It’s not that the rest of the series is bad, far from it. Co-created by Ken Woodruff (The Mentalist) and novelist Steph Cha, this adaptation of the graphic novel by Arash Amel and Marguerite Bennett is a consistently slick and compelling spy thriller that greatly benefits from shooting at a series of memorable South Korean locations. It’s just that it’s tough to top any sequence that opens with Daniel Dae Kim performing a karaoke rendition of The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” concludes with a breakneck chase through the streets of Seoul, and sandwiches multiple costume changes and several fight scenes in between those two points. Some bars are too high to top, not that the rest of Butterfly doesn’t try.

Kim stars as David Jung, a skilled superspy who’s been keeping a low profile after seemingly dying in the line of duty working for Caddis, a private security firm he co-founded with Juno (Piper Perabo), a fellow intelligence operative who now runs the show. Juno’s agents include Rebecca (Reina Hardesty), the now-twentysomething daughter David left behind and now hopes to reclaim. But complications stand in the way of their father/daughter reunion. Rebecca has long assumed that David did die, and, in his absence, she’s fallen under Juno’s sway and adapted her amoral vision of the world. Learning that David has been alive all along doesn’t exactly make her warm to the notion of reuniting with her dad.

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That relationship should be the show’s most intriguing element and likely would be if Rebecca’s character were allowed a little more space to breathe. But where David is allowed room for soulful rumination, Butterfly defines Rebecca as testy and deadly in the first episode and doesn’t really develop the character beyond those descriptors. Hardesty plays those notes well, and throws herself into the series’ many action scenes, but Butterfly sometimes plays like a show that forgot to include the emotional components needed to make it feel like it was about something other than action and intrigue.

6.8

Butterfly

Like

• Fast-paced action
• Strong cast
• Vivid location work

Dislike

• Relationships that ought to be the show’s heart sometimes feel shallowly sketched

Still, action and intrigue can take a series a pretty long way, figuratively and literally. Seoul serves as a kind of hub for Butterfly, but David’s attempts to escape with Rebecca double as a tour of South Korean locales, bringing him to Busan, Pohang, and Daegu. (Other than the pilot and the season finale, each episode shares its name with the city in which it largely takes place.) Their journeys take them from touring skyscrapers to tiny restaurants to massive shipping vessels. Each of these, unsurprisingly, also provides the series’ action choreographers opportunities to stage confrontations unique to each setting.

The mix of family drama and fast-paced action often recalls Alias, even if Butterfly never quite finds the same emotional weight or attempts the same sort of intricate plotting. (Which isn’t to suggest it’s not without surprises.) But in Perabo’s Juno it finds a great, complicated villain. Juno is relentless but not heartless, a quality she sometimes weaponizes. Perabo uses the expressive face we’ve gotten to know from kinder roles for malevolent ends, appearing gentle and concerned even as she puts malicious schemes into place. She also seems, at least at times, to genuinely care for Rebecca. And, even more often, she seems to truly love her son, Oliver (Louis Landau), a Caddis agent whose unsuitability for the job makes him an obvious liability. (Anyone feeling like TV’s been short on failsons since Succession went off the air might want to check out Butterfly solely for this character.)

Butterfly does a few things quite well. Its action scenes are consistently compelling, its six fast-paced episodes fly by, and the cast is solid from top to bottom. (It’s great to see Kim front and center.) The rest it does well enough, laying the groundwork for a solid spy series that future seasons could easily build upon, particularly with later episodes that muddy up the series’ loyalties, upset the status quo, and complicate relationships. If a second season can find a way to start with a bang and then build from there rather than settling into a groove, Butterfly might really take off.

Premieres: All six episodes premiere on Prime Video on Wednesday, Aug. 13
Who’s in it: Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo, Reina Hardesty
Who’s behind it: Ken Woodruff and Steph Cha
For fans of: Twisty spy stories that double as travelogues
How many episodes we watched: 6 of 6