Disney+ K-drama Big Bet season 2: poorly drawn characters undermine fine acting as sprawling gambling crime saga returns
- Second part of gambling crime saga picks up where it left off, with Choi Min-shik’s Korean casino kingpin in the Philippines staring down the barrel of a gun
- He gets out of that tight spot, and many others, as a Korean policeman pursues him, but is he a gangster or just a charming cook? And who will bring him down?
Part two of K-drama series Big Bet begins just where we left it, with Korean expat and casino kingpin Cha Moo-sik (Choi Min-shik) staring up the barrel of Seo Tae-seok’s gun on a hot and humid night while tucked up in bed in his Philippines mansion.
Since we haven’t yet caught up to the sequence that opened the first part of the series last year, in which Moo-sik is arrested by police on murder charges, we know this isn’t the end for the wily underworld entrepreneur.
We may not feel tension, but there is a sense of excitement. “How does he get out of this jam?” we wonder, as we wait to find out.
Moo-sik ends up disarming Tae-seok (Heo Sung-tae), pistol-whipping him with his own weapon and browbeating him into a seething wreck, not that he wasn’t a whistling teapot of rage already.
The first part of Big Bet gave us a lot of Moo-sik flashbacks, yet, despite all the time we have spent with him at various points earlier in his life, the provenance of his many skills has never been satisfactorily explained. We’re expected to accept most of his abilities on faith alone.