‘Butterfly’ is a frustrating spy thriller with a few too many twists

The great Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg once told me that the problem with movie sex scenes is that the movie just stops while we watch the actors have sex. I feel that way about action scenes, especially on TV. Although a handful of directors can make them thrilling — Kathryn Bigelow, Jackie Chan, George Miller — I nearly always find myself waiting for the chase to end or the gunfire to die down so we can get back to the story.

A case in point is Butterfly, a new Prime Video series starring Daniel Dae Kim as a spook who comes out of hiding to save his long-lost daughter. Loosely adapted from a graphic novel by Arash Amel, this labyrinthine six-parter sends its heroes and villains racing all over South Korea. The result is an intriguing, frustrating hybrid in which a spy thriller plays leapfrog with a K-drama about fathers and daughters, mothers and sons.

Kim plays David Jung, a former U.S. government spy who once owned a big private security and intelligence company, Caddis, with his partner, Juno — that’s Piper Perabo — a woman with the ethics of a spitting cobra. Everything changed when somebody sold David out during a mission. Fearing this enemy would harm his teenage daughter, Rebecca, he decided to fake his own death and hole up in South Korea.

Now, nine years later, his plan has worked out oddly. With Juno acting as a kind of surrogate mother, Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) has grown up to be Caddis’ leading assassin. She has a genius for mayhem. In this, she’s the opposite of Juno’s son, Oliver (Louis Landau), who’s weak and always currying his mother’s favor.

Even as David emerges to rescue his daughter from her life as an assassin, Rebecca has been ordered to kill a mystery man — who, of course, turns out to be the father she thought dead. This sets in motion a predictably implausible plot rife with killings, kidnappings and double crosses. There’s an ambitious U.S. senator, Seoul’s cockiest hitman — who seems to be channeling Johnny Depp — and a cute little girl we worry might get killed.

In ways both good and bad, Butterfly joins Reacher, Bosch and Jack Ryan in Prime Video’s enjoyable lineup of shows aimed at modern dads, men traditional enough to like their heroes hyper-masculine, yet cool enough to like kickass heroines.

Although its plot twists are largely standard issue, it’s fun having an American series show us today’s booming, self-confident South Korea with its neon streets and brutalist bridges. And I’m delighted to see Kim, who spent years playing third bananas on shows like Lost and Hawaii Five-0, finally get his chance to carry a series. He does it splendidly, even if there’s more than a little patriarchal sentimentality in the conception of his character.

Butterfly‘s story is intriguing enough that you find yourself asking all sorts of teasing questions. What does it reveal about David that he not only founded a private security firm — a dodgy line of work at best — but did so with Juno, who’ll betray her country for a buck? Exactly how many people is David prepared to kill to save his daughter from being a killer? What if Rebecca prefers being an assassin to reuniting with her old man? And is the show making a point about Juno, a ruthless matriarch who adores her son Oliver, but in such a way that she crushes his soul?

What makes the show frustrating is that it never gets around to digging into such big questions on its way to its season ending cliff-hanger. Butterfly is always on the verge of becoming really compelling, only to have the drama interrupted by another shoot out, martial-artsy brawl or race through the streets of Seoul or Busan. Instead of revelations, we get twists.

Maybe the show will try to address its heavy questions in season two. Then again, maybe not. As Kim surely learned while doing Lost, the key to making a hit TV show lies not in nailing the landing — but in finding ways to keep kicking the can down the road.