Season 1 hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is back, with a different motive.Photo:No Ju-han/Netflix © 2024
No Ju-han/Netflix © 2024
Season 1 ofSquid Game— the South Korean dystopian-action-thriller-genre-buster that produced a mound of bullet-ridden corpses and became a global phenomenon — was essentially about following the rules, making a plan (risky or not) and hoping and sweating your way to survival, then walking away with oodles and oodles of money.
Now thatthe wildly anticipated second seasonhas arrived (more than three years after season 1), the question is whether and how the show has applied these lessons to itself. The television-programming sea, after all, is full of sharks: How daring canSquid 2be (or afford to be) without falling into the jaws of preposterousness? (And don’t we risk this in our own daily lives? But never mind.)
The show, as fans know, is built on a pretty daring concept to begin with. Let’s refresh:
As the deaths accumulate, a cash jackpot, dangled above the players in a huge plastic piggy bank, grows and grows. Unfortunately, Squid Game aims to narrow the crowd down to only one survivor/winner, who then walks off with the prize. The dead losers, meanwhile, are mined for organs to sell on the black market. This, perhaps, is whathost Peter Marshall on the oldHollywood Squaresmeant when he used to refer to “lovely parting gifts.”
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Now we have the new season’s seven episodes — and howisthe game going?
Jo Yu-ri and Yim Si-wan as players with a love connection.No Ju-han/Netflix
No Ju-han/Netflix
The main gimmick of season 2 is that Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), who walked away as season 1’s victor, has renounced his plans to fly away with his kinda-ill-gotten gains. Instead, he’s determined to uncover whatever evil league has created Squid Game, liberate the players and put a stop to the whole enterprise forever (which is moreSpartacusthanGladiator, I suppose). He manages to have himself returned to the game as a repeat player, submitting himself all over again to its numbing, possibly (probably) fatal torture.
Initially, the other players recognize him and embrace him as both celebrity and savior: He knows the rules of every game, doesn’t he? So he can prep them! And he does, helping them dodge bullets during the first game of red light, green light. After that, though, the menu of escapades changes completely. Even 456, for all his moral rectitude, seems panicked. If you listen carefully, you may even hear his knees knocking together.
Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun in Squid Game Season 2.No Ju-han/Netflix © 2024
Emmy winner Jung-jaeis excellent as this hero, whose wits are scrambled over and over as he confronts, or sometimes evades, the latest crisis.
The games, though, have come to seem less important than the players and their miserable, occasionally homicidal, occasionally kind interactions.The standout characters, in terms of behavior and psychology, are Player 149 (Kang Ae-sim), a feisty and sentimental old woman devoted to her not always dependable son, Player 007 (Yang Dong-geun). He looks something likeJohn C. Reilly’s Dr. Steve Brule, which should tell you all you need to know. There’s also the pregnant, endlessly vulnerable Players 222 (Jo Yu-ri) and 044 (Chae Gook-hee), who may be a mystical shaman or just an irrational, slithering kook sowing trouble and doubt.
None of this let’s-mix-it-up-with-the-suffering-characters stuff is terribly original — it’s familiar enough to anyone who’s sat through his or her share of disaster movies. You might imagine to yourself that there could be room here even forShelley Winters fromThe Poseidon Adventure,an annoying woman nonetheless willing to sacrifice herself.
But the acting here, at any rate, is uniformly good, and convincing, and adds to the suspenseful question of whether a character who happens to own a sharp-pronged metal fork will decide to use it as a utensil or a weapon.
However, the season bogs down under one fresh complication: As has been reported elsewhere, this time around the surviving players are allowed to vote at the end of every game, declaring whether they’ll stay for another horrible round (piggy keeps getting heavier with currency) or go home, splitting the winnings. This is a fine lesson in democracy, financial planning and irrational exuberance, but it slows down the drama. It’s as if someone repeatedly inserted footage of voting-booth lines into an action film.
And all that voting, ultimately, changes the direction of the narrative in ways I’d rather not divulge, except to say that it has a touch of—Rambo,maybe?—that I didn’t particularly like. There’s still more than enough mayhem in the brightly colored compound, which at times looks like a LEGO castle, but it’s also much more conventional.
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