While purporting to tell back stories of people so down on their luck, mostly indebted to loan sharks or dodging warrants signaling serious prison time, “The Squid Game” stays so studiously superficial, it builds no genuine regards for its characters or their fate, which is likely to death by mobsters or organizers of the Squid Game.
Characters tend to scream their lines, which is off-putting enough in the original Korean, let alone the badly dubbed and barely acted English.
That’s the Squid Game itself.
The first such game is Red Light, Green Light.
The penalty for breaking rules, clearly stated before each game, or failing to fulfill a task, however arduous, is immediate death.
They cannot go about routine business because the police or a loan shark’s enforcer is always about to remind them of their dire predicaments.
These are desperate people, who not have to acquire ready cash to satisfy the officials and mobsters preying on them but who have spent money that is supposed to go for a family’s rent, a mother’s care, or to maintain a reputation as a the neighborhood’s shining star.
The sad notion in “The Squid Game” is how much death seems as tantalizing an option as facing what exists on the streets of Seoul.
Everything is tightly and logically organized.
The vans meet to form a double-file caravan that goes smoothly over a bridge and to a port where they vans enter a boat that takes them and the contestants to an island.
Their lodging area also looks like a cell block, their compartments cells including a jail-like toilet, simple cot, and Spartan storage and living space.
About the only plot twist that piqued my interest was the appearance of Seoul policeman whose brother is missing and suspected, by him, of participating in the squid game, something the police do not otherwise believe exists.
Another show sampled, Netflix’s “On the Verge,” about four women in L.A.
Reminiscent of “Sex and the City” in format, “On the Verge” lacks that model’s sense of fun and glamor.
The departure was a mere few hours ago, but The Hallmark Channel is ahead of the calendar.
I can grab my water, protein shakes, Goya beans eight cans for $6.99 , and other folderol, while ignoring the trees and reindeer.
That plot tends to be romantic, sentimental, complication-fraught, and resolved by a corny but tearful happy ending.