LOS ANGELES, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Season 2 of Squid Game, on Netflix Thursday, manages to deliver the suspense as effectively as its first season, while also expanding the story. The long-awaited follow-up to the 2021 hit takes the story in compelling directions.
After winning 45.6 billion Korean won as the lone survivor of a death game tournament, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is using his winnings to try to find the masters of that game. He still has PTSD nightmares from the violent competition.
Undercover police officer Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) survived infiltrating the game, but he's back as a traffic cop in Korea. He searches for evidence to prove to his superiors that the game was real.
The first two episodes rightfully devote much of the story to Gi-hun and Jun-ho's search, because it would be odd if they just went back to regular life and forgot about such a traumatic experience.
Just when it is beginning to feel like a fruitless search, they locate someone playing a mini-game that gives a taste of Squid Game. It is bittersweet because the characters want to end these games, but need to find people playing them, and the audience wants to see more games, anyway.
The salesman (Gong Yoo) still invites new players to step off subway trains and play Ddakji at the stations, but he also makes a dramatic demonstration of greed and desperation to people he's not even recruiting.
Even this mini-game is considered a spoiler, but it reinforces the theme that people's inherent greed gets in the way of self-preservation, even if it's not life or death.
Early episodes also introduce potential new players with circumstances that would lead them to join the death games. For example, No-eul (Park Gyu-young) is a homeless mother struggling to get her daughter back.
New players introduced once the new game begins include finance types, who are the kinds of villains other players are risking their lives to escape. Some are celebrities of varying degrees of infamy or belovedness, like YouTube rapper Thanos (Choi Seung-hyun).
Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) is a trans woman competing for money to complete her transition, and she also faces discrimination in the game. A mother and son (Kang Ae-shim and Yang Dong-geun) bring their family drama into play.
Gi-hun returns to the game with a plan to stop it. He's still player No. 456, but the other 455 players are new characters with different quirks that make teamwork and competition challenging.
Previous experience only gives Gi-hun an advantage if people listen to him. Despite his best efforts, Gi-hun can't save everyone so the game is just as violent as before. And some players are so cutthroat that they use Gi-hun's knowledge to sabotage their competition.
What makes a second death game new and fresh is the unfortunate truth that it is impossible to get a group this big to agree on strategy. There are always enough greedy know-it-alls who think they can win.
Even when some of them die trying, that still doesn't convince blowhards that they should cooperate.
So, the dire situation in which Gi-hun finds himself is compounded by the realization that his warnings backfire and rationality can't beat greed. In his performance, Lee effectively conveys the self-preservation and desire to save others, even from themselves, simultaneously.
Within that, smaller groups do cooperate, and that is heartening. And it is all the more tragic that often that is not enough to save them.
Director and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk films the games like a sports movie. K-pop music makes silly children's games rousing, and a slip of the hand can be a devastating setback.
Camerawork makes the competition epic, whether zoomed in on hands flipping dice or filming overhead above patterns of green-suited competitors walking in a pattern or spinning.
Season 2 of Squid Game is both the tale of a winner trying again and a deepening mystery about the game itself. It fulfills the desire for more Squid Game and takes the story in satisfying new directions.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
