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The Recruiter’s Squid Game Return Hits Hard
Gong Yoo’s demented performance in the second season premiere delivers a different sort of slap in the face.
He is an introduction to the game’s escalating brutality and sliver-thin chances of success, all delivered with a polished head tilt and glassy vacant stare; he’s Patrick Bateman haunting Seoul’s subway stations, stalking the woebegone and handing out paper cards of an impressively substantial weight. The Recruiter’s suaveness has always been a front, and when he immediately tracks down Gi-hun, challenges him to another game of Russian roulette, and delivers his baddie origin story, Gong Yoo’s performance ratchets up the senselessness of this all, to emphasize how susceptible we all are to depravity when it’s accompanied by the possibility of financial prosperity. Gong Yoo’s ferociously savage performance here feels like Bateman’s iconic “Did you know I’m utterly insane?” brought to vivid, macabre life: He breaks into a smile as the “Nessun Dorma” aria reaches a crescendo, confidently puts the gun under his chin, and pulls the trigger, still holding onto the weapon that for so long gave him such self-worth and such seeming invincibility.
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