Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022) Review: Youth at Full Lunge

Is Twenty-Five Twenty-One worth watching?

Yes. Twenty-Five Twenty-One is a superb coming-of-age drama, and Kim Tae-ri gives one of the great K-drama lead performances as a teenage fencer who refuses to be told no. Its real subject is how ambition and friendship feel at an age when everything seems permanent, and it captures that with unusual honesty. The reservation is that the later episodes hurry through time and lean on melodrama, so the final stretch is less assured than the glorious first half.

What is Twenty-Five Twenty-One about?

The series opens in the late 1990s, as the 1997 financial crisis tears through South Korea. Na Hee-do (Kim Tae-ri) is a high-school fencer whose school team is dissolved to save money, so she engineers a transfer to the school where her idol, national-team star Go Yu-rim (Bona), trains. Baek Yi-jin (Nam Joo-hyuk) is a few years older and has lost everything: his family’s company has collapsed, and he drops from rich man’s son to rental-shop clerk and odd jobs before finding work as a sports reporter. Their paths keep crossing, and the show follows them over five years as rivals, confidants and something more.

Written by Kwon Do-eun, Twenty-Five Twenty-One is a South Korean series in Korean that aired on tvN and streams internationally on Netflix. This review covers the complete show: one season of 16 episodes, with the story finished.

Kim Tae-ri as a force of nature

Kim Tae-ri was in her early thirties when she played a high-school student, and it hardly matters. Her Hee-do is loud, stubborn, physically fearless and very funny, bursting into rooms and arguments with the same energy she brings to the fencing piste. What makes the performance great is how much hurt sits beneath the bravado. Hee-do’s mother is a busy television news anchor, and the strained, loving relationship between them gives the series some of its most painful scenes.

Nam Joo-hyuk plays Yi-jin as her opposite: quiet, courteous and carrying a weight he rarely admits to. The chemistry between them grows out of banter and shared bad luck rather than instant attraction, which makes the slow shift into romance feel earned.

Friendship written as seriously as romance

The show’s best writing may be for its friendships. The rivalry between Hee-do and Yu-rim moves from hero worship to open hostility to something far more complicated, and Bona is excellent as a champion under crushing family pressure. Choi Hyun-wook and Lee Joo-myung round out a group of five whose teenage in-jokes, fights and loyalties are drawn with real affection.

Kwon’s script also uses the financial crisis as more than period wallpaper. The characters are young people whose futures were rearranged by events beyond their control, and the series keeps returning to that injustice. Fencing matches are staged with genuine tension, and the late-1990s details, from pagers to period pop, are affectionate without becoming a nostalgia checklist.

Where the timeline starts to rush

The series is framed by a present-day storyline in which Hee-do’s daughter discovers her mother’s old diaries, and that thread is thin compared with the story it frames. More seriously, the final episodes cover years at speed, and some developments land with less preparation than the show’s patient early chapters taught viewers to expect. Those turns will frustrate some fans, but they do not undo what came before.

Who should watch Twenty-Five Twenty-One?

It suits anyone who loves sports dramas, stories about first love and friendship, or K-dramas with emotional depth beneath the humour. At 16 long episodes it is a sizeable but manageable commitment. Content is mild: family debt, grief, parental neglect and workplace pressure, with no graphic violence, though its emotional punches are hard ones. Bring tissues for the back half.

If it lands, try these next:

• Our Beloved Summer for another romance that tracks a couple from school days into adulthood.
• Twinkling Watermelon for a gentler, music-driven story of teenage friendship set in the 1990s.
• When Life Gives You Tangerines for a Korean drama that follows its characters across decades with similar emotional force.

The verdict

Twenty-Five Twenty-One is a Korean drama about the fierce, fleeting intensity of being young, and Kim Tae-ri makes it unforgettable. The rushed final stretch keeps it short of perfection, but the friendships, the fencing and the central performance make it one of the most rewarding romantic dramas of its era.

Rating: 4.5/5