Midway through the new season of “Squid Game,” the protagonist, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), talks to a fellow contestant in the murderous big-money competition he has found his way back into. Gi-hun, who claimed the jackpot last season at the expense of hundreds of dead comrades, wants the players to exercise their right to vote to end the game. His friend argues that if they survive just one more round, they could all walk away with a bigger prize.
“Last time I was here,” Gi-hun answers, “someone said the exact same thing.”
You might think the same thing to yourself if you watch the seven-episode return of “Squid Game,” now streaming on Netflix. You will hear things you essentially heard in Season 1. You will see things you saw in Season 1. And should you happen to hear or see something new, it will likely come from a character who is very much like someone you watched die — or kill someone — the first time around.
One suspects this is by design. This “Squid Game” is a “things you’ve seen before” delivery device.
The 2021 premiere of this dystopian South Korean thriller was an international sensation, less for the novelty of its themes (capitalism exploits the desperate) or structure (see “The Hunger Games” and much reality TV) than for its spattery panache and visual inventions. The killer doll! The jumpsuits! The piggy bank! Those are what the people paid to see, and “Squid Game 2” dutifully delivers them again.
Season 1 introduced Gi-hun as a ne’er-do-well debtor who accepts an invitation to play a series of children’s games at a remote location for a life-changing pot of money, all for a viewing audience of debauched billionaire “V.I.P.s.” The losers die — usually spurting great arterial gouts — and a stack of bills representing their worth plops into the insatiable belly of the prize oinker.
Gi-hun emerges 45.6 billion won richer, but shattered and vowing retribution against the game’s organizers. The Gi-hun we meet in Season 2, three years later, is thoroughly grim and hard-boiled, which makes him more formidable but less interesting. (Lee, who gave his hard-luck hero an engaging Everyman spirit, spends this season doing a lot of glowering and speechmaking.)
Of course, he must return to the game in order to destroy it, but “Squid Game” takes its time getting him there. It takes its time with everything, stopping and starting as if in its own game of Red Light, Green Light.
We meet a new set of contestants — many of them variations on Season 1’s casualties — including an arrogant rapper, an elderly mother and her bumbling son, an influencer who pumped a failed cryptocurrency. (A repeated theme is that some of the game’s prey were themselves predators.) The continuing story line in which a policeman (Wi Ha-joon) hunts for the game’s organizers, this time by sea, drags the narrative momentum like an anchor scraping the ocean floor.
The season does try to expand its scope by delving into the staff running the game, particularly the menacing Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), the game’s manager and Gi-hun’s ultimate quarry. Another subplot, involving a North Korean defector (Park Gyu-young), starts intriguingly but never really develops.
What “Squid Game,” directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, still has going for it is its visual imagination. Its themes of class struggle, shared with Korean films like “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer,” are rendered with flair, and not just in the pastel abattoir of the game sets.
A memorable set of Season 2 scenes takes place in a children’s theme park, where we go backstage with the costumed mascots, sweltering inside their fuzzy exoskeletons. As with the deadly playground games of the competition, the delight of childhood here is warped by the cruel economics of the adult world, where one person’s delight is another’s misery.
But there’s a lot more misery than delight as the season returns us to the games, repeating the bloody spectacle with new twists but the same crabs-in-a-barrel personal dynamics.
This season is titled “Squid Game 2,” as if it were a movie sequel, which raises a question about just what this thing is meant to be. Is it a second season of a serial, which advances a larger story line? Is it the follow-up to a blockbuster, offering a stand-alone variation on the thrills of the original? “Squid Game 2” is neither, really. It continues a story but does little over its seven hours to expand it.
And maybe that’s fine for the audience. But if the series is just a vehicle for more of the same high-design carnage, are we, collectively, just a bargain-basement version of the V.I.P.s? Somewhere around the umpteenth stabbing and machine-gun execution, I had to wonder if this was supposed to be fun, and at what point its social critique just becomes fatalism. (I also wondered other things, like how the inmates’ sneakers remain so blindingly white with the gallons of blood spilled on the floors.)
It is possible, of course, to tell a story like this without simply repeating the pattern each season. In the thematically similar series of “Hunger Games” books and films, the story becomes less about the games with each installment and more about the dystopian larger society whose existence sustains and depends on the cruel spectacle.
This season of “Squid Game” hints at larger-scale ambitions but does little to pursue them. As one antagonist tells Gi-hun, “The game will not end unless the world changes.”
The line is a taunt and a dismissal, but you could also read it as a clue. If the blood sport is the natural culmination of an economic death match that everyone everywhere competes in, then the solution to this larger problem must lie outside the game.
It’s just not clear that “Squid Game” is ready to leave the arena — at least, not until after one more round, one more score.
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