Squid Game 2, Baby John: Reviews This Week

Squid Game 2: The Capitalist Demons Of A Bloated Netflix Franchise

Squid Game 2 ends up embodying the capitalist excesses it once made a sharp spectacle of. It would rather live long enough to be a rich villain than die a subversive hero, Rahul Desai writes.

Dir: Hwang Dong-hyuk

Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Lee Byung-hun, Wi Ha-jun, Yim Si-wan, Park Sung-hoon

Stream on: Netflix

SQUID GAME 2 takes off two years after the events of Squid Game, the smash-hit Korean dystopian thriller revolving around a secret contest on a mysterious island where 456 debt-riddled players risk their lives in a series of deadly children’s games for a massive cash prize. If that still sounds like a mouthful, you’ve probably been living under a rock since 2021. The protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), won the contest but remains haunted by the loss of humanity. Gi-hun stays back in Seoul, determined to “end the game”; he pays off his debts but hires the same loan sharks to help him locate the recruiters and their masked Front Man. The other protagonist, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), an undercover detective who infiltrated the contest as a guard only to find that his missing brother was the Front Man, is now a lowly traffic cop. He’s recovered from his brother’s attack, but nobody believes him about the game; he remains obsessed, just like Gi-hun, and spends his off-time on a boat trying to track down that island.

Squid Game 2 spends the first two episodes on this setup. They establish the two men’s isolated mindscape and “after-life” of sorts. Naturally, they find each other and team up to execute their masterplan. The only catch is that Jun-ho continues to keep his brother’s identity a secret. Simultaneously, a fresh crop of debt-riddled people — those trapped by circumstances with no way out — consider entering this contest they hear of during a random Ddakji game on subway platforms. The next five episodes tread familiar terrain: Gi-hun becomes participant no. 456 over five rounds of an increasingly blood-soaked contest featuring new characters. Jun-ho comes by sea, but things don’t go as planned. Chaos reigns, and the foundation for a final season (which has already been filmed) is laid.

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Baby John Is The Worst Film Of The Year

With Baby John, Varun Dhawan joins the long line of male actors transitioning to action stars who willingly hack and chop. He does the same but with an abject insincerity that gleams from the screen, reviews Ishita Sengupta.

Dir: Kalees

Cast: Varun Dhawan, Keerthy Suresh, Wamiqa Gabbi, Jackie Shroff

Playing in: Theatres

LIKE ALL BAD FILMS, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?

Mentioning Atlee is important because Baby John is a scene-by-scene remake of his 2016 Tamil film, Theri. But it is all the more necessary because if anything Kalees’ film does with conviction it is to reiterate the immense watchability of Jawan (2023), Atlee’s directorial debut in Hindi. In hindsight, it might be difficult to extricate the merit of the outing from the aura of Shah Rukh Khan but Baby John proves that the unhinged style, frantic editing, loud expositions, and whistle-worthy hero entries, all too synonymous with Atlee, have a science and commerce to it. And when not done well, the exaggerated machismo and the breakneck speed do not distract from a deficient screenplay but reveal it to be a mangled set piece, no good for anybody.

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