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Movies & TV

31st Aug 2018

Ozark Season 2 arrives this weekend, but is it worth your time?

Rory Cashin

Everyone fell in love with the first season, but how does the follow up compare?

It doesn’t feel like it, but it has been over a year since the first season of Ozark was released on Netflix, and people spent very little time in comparing it to Breaking Bad.

The one-two punch of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney playing against type as parents who take their two kids from Chicago to The Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri to escape a drug lord after a money-laundering scheme goes wrong was too good to pass up, and viewers were absolutely hooked from the get-go.

Without getting too spoiler-y, things didn’t end as bad as they could have, but also they are far from in the clear, but could the show maintain the same level of incredibly dark and violent tension that it displayed first time around?

Well, the reviews are in, and critics seem quite split down the middle about it.

On the one hand, Sioux Sioux City Journal stated: “The show’s writing is sharp and smart; its acting is clever and curt. Toss in that casino wild card and you’ve got a season that’s just as remarkable as the first.”

However, on the opposite end of the scale, The Hollywood Reporter says: “The second season of Ozark is a 10-episode slog of grinding narrative gears, ominous pronouncements about consequences, affectless violence and a monochromatic aesthetic that left me giggling at its miserable pretensions.”

So far, the show has a score of 60% on Metacritic, which is slightly less than the 66% the first season ended up with, so chances are if you loved the first season, you’ll love this one too, but if you weren’t a fan in the first place, these 10 new episodes aren’t going to change your mind.

Or, as Vanity Fair puts it: “Ozark Season 2 isn’t great, but it is good. Netflix’s engaging, popular series has some issues it needs to resolve.”

All 10 episodes of Season Two are available to watch on Netflix right now.

Clip via Netflix

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