‘Squid Game’ is Back and is As Brutally Entertaining As Ever

It’s been three years; we’ll forgive you for forgetting what a phenomenon Squid Game became upon its debut. It remains Netflix’s most-watched TV show or movie for its first 28 days and a shorter, seven-episode new season that came out during the sleepy 2024 holiday break has already proved a gigantic hit.

Reviewing Squid Game Season 2 (or just Squid Game 2, as creator Hwang Dong-hyuk dubs it) is beside the point. Enough people want to return to South Korea’s bloody polemic on income disparity, told through a series of life-or-death competition of children’s games, that the success of the franchise is certain. A third and final season should wrap things up sometime in 2025 with the second and third seasons shot together as one story.

But is the middle section any good?

Reviews have split between critics who find the new season as thrilling as the first and those finding Squid Game 2 repetitive or simply not as novel or well-paced as what came before, especially its cliffhanger conclusion.

The show faces the same problem that The Hunger Games did going into its second and third chapters (plus prequel): in a fiction about a battle royal where everyone but the hero dies, how do you get the hero back into the ring for more of the battle royal that viewers want?

For Squid Game 2, Hwang splits the difference, continuing the threads of where we left hero Seong Gi-hun (still excellent, Lee Jung-jae) as he aims to take down the forces that are running the blood sport. Rather than walk away with the billions he won, a haunted Gi-hun opts instead to use his fortune to track down the game’s leaders and stop the murders of debt-ridden victims.

It takes almost two and half of the season’s seven episodes for Gi-hun to find himself back in the games as Player 456, and while some of the games are familiar, Gi-hun isn’t able to coast to survival with his knowledge. The new set of players are skeptical of his intentions and they’ve tweaked or replaced the games enough to throw him off-balance.

What’s also changed is that the events of the first series have traumatized Gi-hun; he’s cut off from his family as well the humor that made him stand out. That’s a tricky line for Lee to walk, and it’s only later in the season that we see flashes of the personality that made Gi-hun such a memorable lead. Of course, levity in the world of Squid Game doesn’t last long as an unsurprisingly grim finale featuring a contestant uprising sets up the final season.

Hwang’s skills as a filmmaker and writer are still a mixed bag: his visuals can be stunning, especially in the execution (and executions) of the games. The writing tends to be as subtle as a machine-gun squad whenever it verbalizes its themes about the consequences of debt, say from investing in cryptocurrencies. But Hwang is remarkably good at introducing a bunch of new characters and making most of them compelling, sympathetic, and well-cast in a very short amount of screen time.

Among the new characters are contestants Hyun-Ju (Park Sung-hoon), a heroic transgender woman with a military background, a memorable mother-son duo (Kang Ae-sim and Yang Dong-geun), a belligerent rapper named Thanos (real-life performer Choi Seung-hyun), and Park Gyu-young as a North Korean defector who ends up in a surprising Squid Game role we haven’t seen portrayed before. Lee Byung-hun’s Front Man character also has a much larger role this season.

The show also adds effective, tense scenes in which players must vote, ostensibly in a democratic way, on whether they should keep playing the games after each gory round of deaths. They will share the pool of winnings if the contestants agree collectively to walk away, but so many of them are in such deep debt that even millions won won’t fix their problems. Hwang also appears to be commenting on the popularity of Squid Game itself, an out-of-nowhere success that spawned a bad reality show and millions of Halloween costumes and an American version that David Fincher is working on. Gi-hun lectures others on the value of human life and why money won’t solve everyone’s troubles, but his hard-earned wisdom keeps falling on deaf ears.

The seven-episode run of Squid Game 2 at times comes across as truncated. There’s not as much backstory for the contestant characters than in the first season and the show’s tricks for drawing our sympathy and then smacking us down with violence have become predictable even after a three-year gap.

Squid Game 2 is still entertaining enough to suck you right back in with the on-point acting and set pieces easily pulling you through any pacing issues.