Summary
Bandidos goes bigger but not better in a Season 2 that feels disappointingly contrived and obligatory, despite a shift in character focus.
It’s really no surprise that Bandidos was popular, despite it not being very good. It had the format of a heist thriller and the aesthetics of an old-school treasure-hunting adventure, and a decent cast to boot. I wasn’t wild about the whole thing and how it fared in comparison to other similar streaming shows like Baby Bandito, Berlin, and Culprits, but the fact that Season 1 ended with Miguel already eyeing up his next target made Season 2 virtually inevitable.
And thus, here we are. Hiromi Kamata and Fernando Guzonni take up the directorial reins for a second seven-part go-around set a few years after the first, picking up with Miguel and Lili now living together and the rest of the crew off on their own – often ill-advised – endeavors. But the abrupt arrival of Lili’s stepsister Regina and her henchman Mano throws everyone for a loop. Before long, Regina had ‘napped Lili’s old boyfriend, Leo, the old crew’s bank accounts are drained, and everyone is on Miguel’s doorstep looking for a solution.
That solution could potentially take the shape of the next big score, the Tear of Fire, which Moctezuma stole before the Spaniards invaded. Miguel has already found an artifact that will potentially lead them there, so that’ll do for step one. It’s as good a lead as any.
The problem that any heist show has in its sophomore outing is that it has to go bigger. It’s inevitable, really. It also has to contrive a way to bring the crew from the first season back together, which is often more difficult than recruiting them in the first place. Bandidos Season 2 has some mixed results in all this. And its most obviously bold decision – to essentially make Lili the protagonist ahead of Miguel and keep the plot orbiting her backstory – is probably the worst one it makes.
Nothing against Lili, obviously. But there’s something about the ensemble nature of a heist show that doesn’t quite work with a singular focus, so the balance is off. Season 1 was pretty good at dividing its time fairly evenly among everyone, but now that the introductions have long since been handled, pulling everyone back together around Lili – despite them believing she was dead at the end of the first season – feels a bit rote. Lili is just, dare I say it, not that interesting.
The counterpoint to this, I suppose, was that her character was done a little dirty in Season 1. Almost everything she did revolved around being attractive, and she had a dodgy subplot about constantly trying to get Lucas into bed. So this can be seen as a redemption arc. But it still doesn’t translate that well and leaves Miguel, Lucas, Ines, Octavio, and Citlali feeling as if they’re held in stasis.
In other areas, Bandidos does have that Season 2 feeling. It’s much bigger and more expensive looking, and the sets contain an impressive amount of detail. The action has the same fondness for ridiculousness and bending the rules of realism in service to some obligatory “ta-da!” moments down the line. The vibe is very similar, and if the first season had something going for it, it was the vibes.
And the cast has bought back in, for sure. They countered the worst aspects of the first season with an abundance of charisma and chemistry, and they almost do that again here, but the creeping feeling of going through the same motions ultimately proves too difficult to overcome.
It’s a tale as old as time. Netflix – or any other streaming platform, really – has a decent show on its hands that proves popular with international audiences, so they return to the same well and come up with something that can’t quite compare. There’s an artificiality to it all that’s a little off-putting, a sense of doing it all just because, not with the expectation of turning up any real treasure. For a show like Bandidos, that’s kind of the opposite of what you want.
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