'Squid Game 2' is still violent, but more disappointing than shocking: Review

Ready or not, here comes "Squid Game."

The South Korean horror sleeper that became the biggest Netflix series of all time is back for a second season, with more deadly children's games and deeply unsettling musical motifs. It's all the same.

Except it's not, because three years later, the world in which "Squid Game 2" (streaming now, ★★ out of four) returns is drastically different than it was in 2021. And part of that difference is the effect of "Squid" itself: What was once a deeply shocking satire and critique of capitalism has become so popular and ubiquitous that it's too easily reduced to punchlines and memes.

So it is in a new context and with major expectations that the most-viewed Netflix series returns to our streaming queues. All that hype doesn't do the new season any favors; it is underwhelming and underdone. Some things are the same: It still has the piercing (Emmy-winning) performance from Korean actor Lee Jung-jae; the teal tracksuits and masked men in pink hoods have returned; and there is blood and plenty of shocking violence to go around. But there is less bite, less idealism and seemingly less care taken. The outlandishness of the plot requires an even larger suspension of disbelief, and narrative threads are left dangling at the unsatisfying end of the seven-episode season. There is great nuance and uniqueness lost.

Overall, where once there was shock, now it's just, well, "ah."

Season 2 picks up exactly where Season 1 left off, on an airport jetway with unlikely hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee) choosing to fight the puppet masters of the sadistic "games" from Season 1. As you might recall, Gi-hun won a fortune playing children's games in a life-or-death battle with other impoverished players for the amusement of wealthy gamblers. Instead of taking his 45.6 billion won (roughly $31 million) and shutting the heck up, Gi-hun devotes his newfound wealth to trying to find and shut down the games. The first episode quickly jumps three years ahead as the aggrieved man pays people to search subway stations for the mysterious recruiter who once invited him to the games.

Meanwhile, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), a Seoul police officer who in Season 1 infiltrated the games to find his missing brother, is also searching again. He discovered that his brother, In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), was the masked "Front Man" in charge of the whole operation. In-ho shot Jun-ho, who fell off a cliff but survived and was rescued by a fisherman. Now he spends his free time searching the dozens of islands off the coast, hoping he'll find the one with all the blood-soaked kids' games.

Without spoiling too much, Gi-hun eventually lands back inside the games, where he tries to save lives among the 455 new players, which feature a new colorful cast of desperate characters: a YouTuber who lost it all backing the wrong cryptocurrency; a degenerate gambler and his mother; a trans woman who lost her livelihood when she came out; and another good buddy of Gi-hun's (he's got friends in low places, it seems).

It's all serviceable. The new games are interesting and exciting (one even looks like a lot of fun, except for the whole you-die-if-you-lose thing). Lee remains an exceptional performer. The trans character Hyun-ju (played by cisgender man Park Sung-hoon) is by far the best addition to the cast, offering a really different perspective than any of the players highlighted in Season 1.

But otherwise, Season 2 mostly offers cognitive dissonance and frustration. The second half morphs into a fairly generic action set piece, crescendoing to a bitterly underwhelming climax and a conclusion that offers no kind of closure. It gives the distinct impression that director and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote Seasons 2 and 3 as a single story and just chopped it somewhere in the middle to prolong the series for another season for Netflix.

It's hard in a lot of ways to reckon with what "Squid" has become three years after the series took everyone from viewers to Hwang to Netflix by surprise. At its core, "Squid" is a deeply anti-capitalist fable, a sharp critique of South Korean culture (and all capitalist culture) and the deep inequities built into a society chasing infinite economic growth. The bad guys are rich gluttons, the good guys are the struggling poor. The game is the system that keeps one as chattel for the other.

But you can't ignore the reality in which "Squid" itself becomes a tool of capitalism, as Netflix's glittering crown jewel among "billions of hours viewed" that's fodder for awards campaigns, tie-ins with the likes of Duolingo and a distasteful reality-TV spinoff. It's extratextual context that weakens the overall critique within the series. And Season 2 doesn't serve Hwang's stated anticapitalist message, either; by the end it gets so wrapped up in details that it loses its political plot.

It's a huge shame, and it's unclear what went wrong and who's to blame. Did Hwang really want to continue the story, or did the success of Season 1 force the show to last longer than it should have? Will it all make more sense when Season 3, due in 2025, is released?

Or will we find ourselves as trapped in a doomed "Game" as Gi-hun is?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Squid Game' Season 2 review: Plenty of violence, but less bite