Netflix’s ‘Money Heist: Korea’ Is ‘Squid Game’ Meets a Cheesy Heist Movie

As casual viewers and dedicated binge-watchers alike know, there’s simply too much TV these days—both in terms of the number of shows, and the length of their copious installments. On the heels of Stranger Things’ bloated fourth season, that overabundance is now also seen via Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, a spin-off of Álex Pina’s hit Spanish crime series whose six Season 1 episodes all clock in at over an hour, and three of which top a whopping 70 minutes. As is so often the case with modern small-screen affairs, more is definitely not better, with a lack of concision leading to wheel-spinning detours and unnecessary subplots. More troubling for director Kim Hong-sun’s thriller, however, is the same thing that plagues Pina’s popular original: a surplus of cheesiness.

Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area sets its action in a 2026 in which North and South Korea have put aside their differences and agreed to unify. The first step in that process is the creation of a mutual economic region where they can come together financially and culturally, replete with a new shared currency. The epicenter of this area is the Unified Korea Mint, where that money is being printed, and it’s also the target of the Professor (Yoo Ji-tae), a criminal mastermind with a plan to break into the heavily fortified building and walk away with four trillion won. To do this, he assembles a motley crew whose members each boast a specialized skill fit for this operation. When the time comes to pull off the heist, they don matching red jumpsuits and smiley-face masks like they were the cousins of the contestants on Squid Game and take the Mint’s employees hostage while carrying out their illicit undertaking.

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In other words, Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area is like its Spanish counterpart as well as innumerable other robbery-related fictions. There’s no real twist to these proceedings that differentiate it from similar efforts, which places the storytelling burden on Ryu Yong-jae, Kim Hwan-chae, and Choe Sung-jun’s scripts. Those immediately focus on dapper fortysomething genius Professor and his recruits, all of whom assume foreign-city nicknames as a means of concealing their identities from each other, their hostages, and the police. Tokyo (Jeon Jong-seo) is a North Korean expat who was saved from a life of degradation by the Professor, to whom she’s intensely loyal. Berlin (Park Hae-soo) is a ruthless labor-camp survivor who thinks instilling fear is the best method of exerting control. Nairobi (Jang Yoon-ju) is a cagey counterfeiter and con woman. Rio (Lee Hyun-woo) is a brash hacker. Moscow (Lee Won-jong) is a former miner and demolitions expert. His son Denver (Kim Ji-hoon) is a dim-witted street fighter. And Helsinki (Kim Ji-hun) and Oslo (Lee Kyu-ho) are the Professor’s thuggish muscle.

Though there’s talk about the precariousness of the two nations’ alliance, and how unification has widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the Professor’s reason for wanting to break into the Mint is left vague, the better to save some revelations for a potential second season. What’s less oblique is that the Professor doesn’t want anyone hurt or killed during the heist, both because he’s a good guy (deep down) and because he eventually means to use public opinion to his advantage. Unsurprisingly, that’s easier said than done, since there are 50-odd hostages to be wrangled inside the Mint, led by the facility’s director Cho Young-min (Park Myung-hoon), who has a habit of causing trouble for everyone, beginning with his oft-mistreated mistress Yoon Mi-seon (Lee Joo-bin). Nonetheless, there’s scant tension when it comes to these potentially explosive dynamics, since Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area quickly lets on that it doesn’t have the guts to actually kill any of its characters.

By tipping its hand regarding the danger everyone is in, the series renders itself a low-stakes (if intricately designed) cat-and-mouse game, highlighted by the Professor’s back-and-forths with Seon Woo-jin (Lost’s Kim Yun-jin), the negotiator assigned to run the National Police Agency’s responding task force. In an early twist, it’s revealed that the Professor has already struck up a romantic relationship with Woo-jin (who doesn’t know her beau is the Professor)—one of many ways in which he endeavors to gain intel on his adversaries and stay one step ahead of capture. While that may not be completely plausible, it’s a development that at least speaks to the narrative’s fixation on divisions, many of which—such as Woo-jin’s friction with her more gung-ho second-in-command, Captain Cha Moo-hyuk (Kim Sung-oh)—are rooted in the still-raw feelings felt by North and South Koreans for each other and their democratic/authoritarian ways of life.

Those hostilities are exploited by the Professor and Berlin to maintain order and achieve their ends, but Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area only superficially cares about politics; its main interest is fast-paced suspense and romance. Director Kim Hong-sun indulges in the sort of glossy, showy compositions (full of posing characters), whiplash-inducing camerawork and insistent scoring that recalls early-2000s American cinema, when every other blockbuster director was desperately trying to ape Michael Bay. This style certainly keeps things from dragging, yet it can’t make up for a collection of paper-thin protagonists. Whether they’re preaching loyalty and levelheadedness, disobeying orders in mutinous fashion, putting their own desires and safety over that of their compatriots, or falling in love, the show’s characters go through their motions like stock figures modeled after a million genre-fiction ancestors.

Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area becomes so busy with its various interpersonal dilemmas that the execution of the actual heist soon falls by the wayside; for the majority of its six distended installments, no one even talks about the very money that’s the purpose of this entire venture. That might function as its own clever twist if it seemed purposeful, but when coupled with a handful of glaring plot holes, it mostly feels like a byproduct of the series’ shallowness. Intent on delivering flashy thrills, it comes across as the Netflix equivalent of a trivial paperback beach read, albeit one unreasonably—and unsustainably—expanded to War and Peace-size episodic dimensions.

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