Last night I burned through the final six episodes of Beef 2, having watched #1, #2 and #3 the night before. It certainly becomes faster and crazier and more whack-jobby as it hurtles toward the Seoul climax. But the more hellzapoppin’ it gets the more desperate it feels.
I started frowning and shaking my head and saying “this is just nuts.” Everyone is so willing to betray everyone else. The high level of craft and grade-A acting is good to absorb, but when all the characters except one are this ruthless, this endlessly selfish and totally cutthroat, a certain kind of boredom is inevitable. Seoyeon Jang ‘s “Eunice” is the only decent, true-blue human in the whole thing.
By the end Beef 2 feels like an insubstantial, surface-skimming Michael Bay film. Carey Mulligan would never star in a Bay vehicle (not smart or classy enough for the British Streep) but she’s sure as hell toplining a relatively shallow, almost-Daffy-Duck-level-during-the-final-episodes Lee Sung Jin film…same difference!