Lead cast: Song Seung-heon, Oh Yeon-seo, Lee Si-eon
Latest Nielsen rating: 4 per cent
Six years after conning their way to ratings success in The Player, Kang Ha-ri (Song Seung-heon) and most of his gang have returned for a new season of slick double-crosses in The Player 2: Master of Swindlers, which has moved over from its original channel OCN to sister cable network tvN.
Following a brief recap of season one, the original gang are all present and accounted for in the cold open for the new season, as confidence man Ha-ri, hacker Im Byung-min (Lee Si-eon), muscle Do Jin-woong (Tae Won-suk) and driver Cha Ah-ryeong (Krystal Jung) embark on another daring heist in 2021.
Once their mission is complete, the quartet seem to get away scot-free, but before they can celebrate they are attacked and tied up in a warehouse.
There a villain offers to give them back their freedom, but only if one of them dies. Ha-ri tries in vain to sacrifice himself first, but when a gun is turned on Byung-min, Ah-ryeong jumps into the bullet’s path and dies.
Jung, a member of the K-pop band f(x), is a much bigger screen star than she was in 2018 and we can only assume that getting her back was no longer on the cards, leaving us with this cameo appearance acting out her character’s heroic but senseless and contrived death.
Her sister Cha Je-yi (Jang Gyu-ri of the K-pop outfit Fromis 9), who did not feature in the first season, appears out of the blue to take her place. She is also an ace driver and has more or less the same cocky personality, except that Jang is no match for the more talented Jung as a screen presence.
The characters are so similar that one wonders if the scripts were already written with the assumption that Jung would return and were later lightly modified on the fly to allow for a new actress late in the process.
The story then skips forward to the present, with Je-yi now firmly part of the crew. The first villain-of-the-week is the oily scammer Kang Do-young (Tae In-ho), who is promising ordinary people riches through his dodgy NFTs and bleeding them dry.
Everyone attempts to out-scam one another, with Ha-ri’s scheme in the end coming out ahead. With Do-young out of the picture, Ha-ri has put himself on the radar of Do-young’s more dangerous boss.
Back in Korea, Soo-min makes Ha-ri an offer he cannot refuse: if his team works for her for a year to take down a variety of despicable criminals, she will erase their criminal records.
Full of bluster and verve, The Player 2: Master of Swindlers is cut from the same cloth as classic team heist films such as Ocean’s Eleven, as well as the many Korean examples of the subgenre that have popped up over the years, including the films of Choi Dong-hoon, such as Tazza: The High Rollers and The Thieves.
Six years is a long time in the world of Korean dramas and, thanks to developments in the interim, this follow-up season seems to benefit from a higher budget than the first one.
Although not original, the set pieces deliver their intended thrills, particularly the opening artefact heist in a building, which is distinctly reminiscent of several Mission: Impossible films, notably when Ha-ri hangs on a rope just above the ground like Ethan Hunt.
As undemanding entertainment, The Player 2: Master of Swindlers offers wisecracking banter, brawls, characters with hidden agendas and plenty of double-crosses.
Where it struggles is in its inability to separate itself from the many similar shows that have preceded it – the con-artist crime-action subgenre in Korean media has felt stale for years.
There is always enough going on to avoid reaching for the remote control – but whether it will be enough to keep us tuning in week after week remains to be seen.
The Player 2: Master of Swindlers is streaming on Viu in selected territories.