Summary
Snabba Cash‘s second season feels disappointingly reiterative, with the characters having learned seemingly nothing and the show idling through a perfunctory story we’ve seen too many times before.
This review of Netflix’s Snabba Cash Season 2 is spoiler-free.
READ: Our review of the first season.
Netflix’s Snabba Cash was a solid entry into the overcrowded crime genre, adapting well-respected source material and providing a welcomely unique slant on the played-out tropes. It ran for six episodes, which for once didn’t feel like enough, and built to a conclusion that left fans wanting more.
Well, now they’ve got more – and they might have spoken too soon. This second season, which runs for another six episodes, feels very much like a retread of the first, bogging down the pacing with reiterative subplots and character beats, and watching the same characters make the same mistakes again and again becomes tedious surprisingly quickly.
It feels more like a redo than a sequel, then, with things picking up with seemingly no lessons having been learned in the interim. The easy money of the title proves to be the undoing of everyone once again, and actions continue to have consequences that at this point should be expected. With Leya, returning in a slightly more glam and ambitious form after her last-minute maneuvering in the first season finale becomes difficult to root for since she’s so clearly wielding the shovel that’s digging her grave.
And the thrills in this so-called thriller have been left by the wayside too, settling instead into a glacial drama with barely an end in sight. Season 1’s well-observed details give way to knotty, needlessly convoluted storytelling that quickly becomes a chore to sift through, especially without a relatable anchor we can latch onto. The lack of someone to root for isn’t a death knell for fiction, despite people constantly insisting it is, but other elements of the production need to pick up that slack. They don’t here. The intersection of crime and start-up entrepreneurship remains a compelling backdrop, but everyone involved seems to have no idea how to navigate a business that some of them have been involved in for a lifetime.
Perhaps this doesn’t ring true because the show is adamant about characterizing in terms of what the players don’t have, what they need, rather than who they are and what their real values might be. There’s an undeniable cultural allure to the drug business that remains unaddressed here, with not even a tokenistic acknowledgment of how pop culture’s glorification of illegality makes it appealing to the youth.
The whole thing just feels empty as a result, as though it’s churning through genre motions for the sake of it, with little idea of how to make the well-worn territory more compelling to retread. The writing is inconsistent and stylistic quirks are picked up and dropped on a whim, without having fulfilled any purpose in their usage. After a very respectable first season, it’s miserable to find the second so content to be a murky reflection of its success.
You can stream Snabba Cash Season 2 exclusively on Netflix.
