Making Squid Game a TV reality contest is SO cynical. I loved it...
Squid Game: The Challenge
Netflix, Wednesday ★★★★★ Boat Story
BBC1, Sunday & Monday ★★★★★
Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to put this, so I’ll just put it straight: the show that, surely, we were all ready to despise, and ready to despise with every fibre of our being, turns out to be pretty good. The scale of it – that’s gripping in and of itself. I couldn’t look away. I hope you will forgive me.
Squid Game: The Challenge is a Netflix reality competition series based on its own drama, Squid Game, which became its mostwatched show ever, trouncing Bridgerton, although I expect you won’t read about that in any of Lady Whistledown’s newsletters. The original show was a satirical take on capitalism, inequality and exploitation as 456 players, all of whom desperately needed money, competed in a series of deadly children’s games to win a huge cash prize.
Now Netflix has desatirised it and made it real, with real players and with $4.56m up for grabs (holy moly!), and who wasn’t sceptical about such a cynical, exploitative move?
I was sceptical, I was cynical – and then watched all the episodes given to reviewers (eight out of the 10) on the trot. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.
It is a logistical triumph. It is epic. It kicks Traitors with its country house into the dirt.
Here they’ve recreated the dorm and the wendy house-style corridors and the ‘games room’ and the glass bowl hanging from the ceiling that fills with cash, and even the red-suited, ominous ‘workers’ (who, in this instance, are extras who have been choreographed to move in unison menacingly).
There are the 456 players, mostly Americans, who range from a retired editor at The New York Times to a guy who has only ever lived in cars. There are also two Irish contestants.
The first game is Grandmother’s Footsteps with that giant, sinister mechanical doll, and while it isn’t possible to kill players (yet) they’re fitted with ink-packs that splatter across their chests when they are ‘eliminated’.
It’s a tad silly at first, but as numbers dwindle, it does become quite shocking.
With so many players you can’t possibly keep track of them all, but this does a good job bringing some back stories forward – although don’t for a moment imagine those players are safe – even if it’s not a perfect process.
When there are only 12 players left you’ll be thinking: ‘Hang on, who’s that?’
But it is fascinating as they forge alliances, or don’t – Player 160: ‘I have no loyalty to anyone. I am loyal only to piggy’ – and try to predict what’s next, when they can’t.
They predict tug-of-war, choose themselves a team based on brawn, then discover it’s Battleships.
There’s also that biscuit-licking game and marbles (oh God, marbles), yet their future may simply depend on the roll of a dice.
It is cruel. It is unbelievably vicious. There are ‘character tests’ that set them against each other. There are betrayals.
There are Big Brother elements, which are rather wearisome, but just when you’re thinking, ‘Hurrah, I can look away now,’ they bring on the ‘glass bridge’, which is as eerily beautiful as it is terrifying.
Okay, maybe I won’t look away just yet. Once more, so sorry.
Can I put my disapproving hat back on now? Great, here goes.
So, Boat Story is the latest drama from brothers Jack and Harry Williams (Missing, Liar, The Tourist – we don’t need to talk about Angela Black).
It is being sold as ‘a hilarious dark comedy’, but it isn’t that hilarious, and for ‘dark’ read ‘extremely violent’. This violence, while deeply unpleasant, and often unnecessary, isn’t my main complaint, which is this: it is just so self-consciously arch. And so pleased with itself even if it’s not that original.
Tarantino, the Coen brothers, they’ve been here, and as for the basic premise, that’s essentially Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, which you may want to look up.
This begins with two early-morning dog walkers, Janet (Daisy Haggard) and Samuel (Paterson Joseph), discovering a beached boat containing millions of pounds worth of cocaine, which they decide to pilfer. Both are debt-ridden, Squid Game-style.
Samuel has a gambling habit while Janet lost a hand in an industrial accident.
We spool back to see the accident in graphic detail even if, on the basis of the first two episodes, her onehandedness has yet to fulfil any narrative purpose.
B
ut back to the story. This amount of cocaine has to belong to someone who will want it back, and this someone is a French fella, The Tailor (Tchéky Karyo, the French actor from The Missing and Baptiste), who is in Paris tailoring in one room and cutting someone’s tongue out in another.
The butchery and bloodshed on display are very un-Sunday evening.
I think I also saw, though my fingers, someone being repeatedly struck with a hammer and a young policewoman and policeman being shot in the head, also for no narrative purpose whatsoever.
It counters this with its archness, and all manner of whimsical gimmicks.
There are silent-movie intertitles, for example, and a voiceover similar to Tom Baker’s from Little Britain – ‘Janet is a woman with blue hair driving towards Thursday’ – whereas resources might have been better spent on character work.
As it stands, this is wholly cartoonish. I think I also saw someone being turned into a human pinata, by the way.