Summary
Weak Hero Class 2 sacrifices some emotional depth and ambiguity to make the most of Netflix’s deep pockets, delivering impressive action aplenty but less memorable texture.
It’s hard to stay out of trouble in high school, especially if you’re the protagonist of a popular K-Drama. Yeon Si-eun (Park Ji-hoon, excellent here) was the reluctant brawler at the heart of Weak Hero Class 1, which finally arrived on Netflix three years after its 2022 debut on the Korean streaming service Wavve. In Class 2, he’s more reluctant to get involved in conflict than ever, but fails just as miserably, drawn within one episode into a tasty battle with a collective of high-school gangs dubbed “The Union”.
Aside from his comatose best friend, who remains the most clear holdover from the first season, Si-eun is the only connective tissue between the first batch of eight episodes and Class 2. He’s at a new school, Eunjang, thanks to his now widely rumoured exploits, and he’s surrounded by new allies and enemies. This gives the follow-up a fresh, almost anthological feel, even if the essential formula is very much the same – Si-eun punches the bullies in the face.
But there’s a bit more to it than that. The move to Netflix – the first season arrived on the platform eventually, but the second is being dubbed as a proper original – has provided a budgetary injection that the show clearly benefits from, especially in its expansive and neatly-choreographed fight sequences, of which there are plenty. But bigger doesn’t always necessarily equal better. Si-eun’s reputation preceding him, combined with Netflix’s fondness for showy action, means that Weak Hero Class 2 gets into the thick of the action very quickly, without the time to establish much depth or the kind of extreme pressure-cooker circumstances that kicked the first season into gear.
For the uninitiated, that first season ended in tragedy, with one of Si-eun’s friends turning on the others and another ending up in a coma, which he remains in during Class 2. Si-eun, who was a remarkably intelligent student – which goes almost completely unremarked upon here – is forced to transfer to Eunjang, a rough and violent school, since it’s the only one that’ll take a student with his reputation. He’s quickly targeted by the school bully, Choi Hyo-man (Yoo Su-bin), who turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg, and is once again forced into a serious conflict to protect himself and his new allies.
Choi Min-yeong as Seo Juntae in Weak Hero Class 2 Cr. Darae Lee/Netflix © 2025
Those allies include bespectacled victim Seo Joon-tae (Choi Min-young, Twenty-Five Twenty-One; Xo, Kitty), popular basketball player Go Hyun-tak (Lee Min-jae, Taxi Driver), and Eunjang’s knight in shining armour, Park Hoo-min, aka Baku (Ryeoun), who has remained the school’s last line of defence against forced membership in the Union. That group’s leader, Na Baek-jin (Bae Na-ra), has a real bee in his bonnet about Baku and will do anything in his power to bring Eunjang under his control.
This lineup is fun and varied – Ryeoun is particularly entertaining and provides a ton of comedic and kinetic energy whenever he’s on-screen – but lacks the authenticity of Class 1’s leading trio, which felt like a tight-knit group formed under the stress of more genuine circumstances. The bigger budget and more outlandish premise and action contribute to the feeling of a showier season that lacks some depth of character, with things quickly coalescing into a morally unambiguous conflict between upstanding heroes and cartoonishly evil baddies.
This is nevertheless enjoyable thanks to the solid and frequent action. Si-eun’s internal conflict is interesting – he’s wracked by guilt over the events of Class 1 and is terrified of history repeating itself – but his approach to fighting adds a psychotic edge to the action, and you’ll likely never look at pens the same way again. The clever undercurrent of Si-eun as a character is that he’s symbolic of the weaker, put-upon fighter doing anything in their power to rise up against a bigger, stronger, more capable foe. He’s the cornered animal personified, but in Class 2 of Weak Hero, it’s really only the action set-pieces in which this is expressed. There’s little time for more intimate character work, even though Park Ji-hoon does his absolute best with what he has.
Mileage will, of course, vary, depending on what you valued more in Class 1 – the emotional texture or the fighting. Class 2 leans very heavily against the latter, expanding the brawls with bigger and more operatic staging, which is impressive throughout, even if it’s ultimately more hollow. But some of the challenging ambiguity and authenticity are left by the wayside for this to happen, which is lamentable, if not necessarily the end of the world. Weak Hero remains an engaging, enjoyable, and eminently binge-worthy proposition in its new Netflix home.
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