Netflix’s highly anticipated Squid Games Season 2 has been ill-received, earning scathing reviews from disappointed critics.
The latest storyline follows the show’s protagonist Gi Hun (Lee Jung Jae), as he returns to the deadly games seeking retribution and a face-off with the game’s showrunner, the Front Man (Lee Byung Hun).
The first season was received to wild critical acclaim, including major awards sweeps, like historic wins at the 74th Emmy Awards, with Best Actor and Best Director in the bag for Lee Jung Jae and creator Hwang Dong Hyuk.
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Season two however, which was nominated ahead of its official release for the Golden Globes, disappointed critics, including those at The New York Times and Rolling Stone.
Daniel Fienburg, a TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter, slammed the season for losing sight of its vision and fraught sense of wonder along the way.
“It’s a thorough letdown… lacking in the fun and whimsy that kept the first season from wallowing in its backdrop of misery, and entirely lacking in new details or insights on the nature of the Game,” he wrote.
The seven-episode season, the critic continued, felt like “barely a season at all,” and instead, seemed to exist merely as a build-up to the show’s conclusive third season.
The sequel wasn’t all flops, Fienburg maintained, thanks to its style (which “remains intact, if stagnating”) as well as “sturdy, if less entertaining” performances from Lee Jung Jae.
The critic, however, felt that the season sorely missed the mark in delivery: “It’s not a fundamental level on which Squid Game is broken, but season two simply doesn’t work,” he said.
Rolling Stone critic Alan Sepinwall accused Hwang’s latest project of offering nothing novel to say after the massive success of his first season, with demands for a follow-up smash hit so taxing that it literally made his teeth fall out of his mouth.
“Nor, for that matter, does Squid Game have much new to say on the subject of income inequality, which is the whole point of this macabre story,” Sepinwall wrote.
“It’s a social issue that’s only gotten worse since the first season debuted, yet the closest the new season gets to acknowledging any kind of shift is the fact that one of the players, disgraced YouTube influencer Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), bankrupted himself and several of the other contestants by endorsing crypto.”
James Poniewozik at The New York Times felt that the show had hit a wall, or more accurately, a “red light.”
The critic felt the showrunner faced a formidable stopgap and wavered in the identity that made it a fan favorite right out of the gate, evident in the season’s “stall.”
“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?” he positioned.
“Squid Game 2 is neither, really. It continues a story but does little over its seven hours to expand it.”
