After reading reviews here, I was expecting maybe too much. I enjoyed the first film a lot, so I was excited to see this anyway, but the reviews on this site made out that this was a massive improvement on the original in every department.
It wasn't.

Throwing in a half-Korean-American cop for more international appeal, this sequel opens with our North Korean hero and the said American losing the criminal they're both chasing... who then pops up in South Korea. Yes, a good way to get it all going...
but then it quickly goes downhill.
In the original, the South Korean cop was a bit of a loser and very funny; in this one, his introduction really lagged - so that high-octane start was right out the window!
Noodles aside, the gags were dumb and the calibre of writing clearly wasn't on a par with the first! Sadly, this would prove evident throughout the rest of the film.

The sister-in-law many of us saw as the perfect Korean "waifu" is back and, where the producers were smart to give her more screentime, she felt shamelessly additional to nearly all of her scenes outside of the home, making her nothing but fan-service,
And if you're going to do fan-service, why not go bikinis too?

Joking aside (I'm glad she kept her clothes on), the problem with ensemble cast films is that they tend to be overly long; this wasn't an exception! Many scenes felt devoid of humour and failed to drive the story forwards or develop characters, while the moment the hot sister-in-law meets the American is pure cringe!
I was hoping that she was trying to make the North Korean dude jealous, so that he'd be forced to act, but instead, she was just made to look bad.

The fights are okay in this; there's a lot of gunfire which isn't very interesting and the South Korean seems oddly bad-arse - which really cost comedic potential - but really, for me, the plot just wasn't anywhere near as good as the original. This one also left a few loose ends... which may be to set up a 3rd instalment, but I'm not sure the American cop would be needed, and just trying to get our handsome hero back to the South to finally settle down with you-know-who would take too much screentime already.