i feel differently on this. His performance here was better than average, I would say it was raw, powerful and engaging. He displayed a variety of emotions througout the series and showed many sides to his character, jin yanxi. There was the childish, playful side of Yanxi...the spoilt, pampered side...kind, helpful side dealng with his friends...the romantic, stubborn side before marriage...selfish, unresponsible side after marriage....the helpless, weak side after his father's death...i could go on and on
quite honestly, i thought his performance was brilliantly compelling, albeit a tad raw. but the tranformation from willful, carefree playboy to the deeply remorseful broken man who lost his dad, wife, son and money at the end was realistic.
i agree the show was indeed draggy at times, esp. with the formulaic xiao lian(poor maid) and liu chun jiang(promising rich guy) storyline. bear in mind though, <jin fen shi jia> broke cctv's (mainland largest tv network) viewership ratings record when it first ran. so much so that it became an instant classic, catapulted chen kun into the top leading man status and made alot of people forget about his already successful turn in his earlier series, <xiang wu, xiang yu, you xiang feng>. A poor performance would not do that. The director said so himself before it ran, it was boom or bust...the lead character was involved in 70% or so of all the scenes...the show's success depended alot on whether the audience would like the main guy's performance. I can't imagine someone else doing a much better job as Yanxi.
Moreover, it broke the ratings record despite the fact that it ran during the Iraq war and SARS epidemic when tv channels were dominated by those news stories. It commanded alot of viewers despite not having a built-in fanbase like Jin Yong or Qiong Yao series. The Zhang Hen Shui novel it was adapted from was also not well know to start with, neither was most of the cast. Additionally, when they did an informal survey of the people who liked CK's acting from <jin fen>, many were highly educated people, from health professionals to teachers...teenage girls alone don't give u that kind of viewership ratings.