Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Good Morning, Veronica: Season 2’ on Netflix, the Continuing Story of an Ex-Cop’s Violent Quest for Vengeance

Brazilian Netflix series Good Morning, Veronica returns for its second season with its titular heroine one dragon tattoo shy of, well, you know. The series’ debut volley of episodes hit in 2020, adapting Raphael Montes’ crime novels; it established star Taina Muller’s gritty screen presence, playing underestimated police clerk Veronica Torres, who’s become a hardcore vigilante. I mean, she’s practically Batman now. She went through some heavy shit – which is recapped here in all its over-the-topness – and sure doesn’t seem likely to get any lighter over the next six episodes.

Opening Shot: A slow handheld crawl over the ground. We see an iguana. A motorcycle. A person on their stomach on a cliff, looking down over some shady people doing shady things.

The Gist: But first, a recap: Mild-mannered police clerk Veronica found herself embroiled in a deep conspiracy involving a serial killer, an “orphanage” and mafiosos – and it was all tied to her own trauma, an incident where her cop father killed her mother and attempted suicide, but ended up with severe brain damage, in a vegetative state in a nursing home. Turns out the mafia were behind it, framing her father for investigating their criminal enterprise. And now she’s pissed. She’s gonna take ’em down. She faked her death so she can infiltrate the evil jerks and that’s where she is now, on the cliff, taking photos of crooks doing crooked shit.

We see black trucks, people in sunglasses, exchanges of goods in duffel bags, a gun, a man whose face is obscured and wearing a gold ring with a sigil. Veronica takes a shot, but from a gun this time. Headshot. She hops on the motorcycle and roars off, chased by a woman in a truck. They exchange gunfire but Veronica gets away and heads back to her secret lair where she has a secret bulletin board full of photos and maps and documents outlining the conspiracy. But this is season two, and it’s a different chapter in her story, so that requires a bulletin board renovation, with some new names and faces and words written on papers with question marks after them, denoting that she doesn’t know all the info on that thing yet. You know how it goes.

Of course, her husband and kids think she’s kaputskies; her confidant Prata (Adriano Garib) knows her secret and babysits her kids and allows her in her old house to sniff her kids’ hair as they sleep. Meanwhile, that guy with the gold ring with a sigil? He’s Matias (Reynaldo Gianecchini), an Extremely Rich Person who lives in a house that’s all white everywhere with a perfect family. We hang out as he and his wife and their daughter Angela (Klara Castanho) are interviewed by a journalist lobbing softballs at him and not at all catching the creepy vibes of this saintly collection of tightly wound human beings acting phony as a chocolate .357 Magnum.

Meanwhile, Veronica spies on people, and seeks out info on the mafia leader who we know is Matias even though she doesn’t, and does 1,000,000 abdominal crunches. She shakes down a connected lawyer, dodges the cops she used to work for but don’t know she’s the vigilante they’re trying to nab and reconnects with her former co-worker Nelson (Silvio Guindane), who’s so totally on her side, because he too has a secret bulletin board full of photos and maps and documents! They’re soulmates! They have sex; she whales on a heavy bag; some heavy shit goes down, as it always does. And guess what? She figures out Matias is the big bad – and we learn he’s some type of fancy gilded religious evangelist cult-leader type creep, right when she walks into the flocking thrawn of his moony-eyed congregation.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This series started out like a by-the-numbers CSI clone complete with grim detectives grimly hovering over grim dead bodies on slabs, and all that. But it feels very Girl with the Dragon Tattoo now, crossed with the heavy-duty cornball soap-operatic overtures of something like Sons of Anarchy.

Our Take: I’ll say this for Good Morning, Veronica – it moves quickly. No time to be bored when every other scene hooks you with high-drama plot progress, whether it deepens Veronica’s commitment to eliminating society’s most misogynistic cretins from the gene pool, or teases us with glimpses into whatever horrible stuff is happening in Matias’ perfectly pristine white manor (e.g., who is that very clearly traumatized strawberry-blond woman living with them?).

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Upon reviewing the series pilot, I wrote that Veronica was “primed to be a conscientious, morally prudent hero.” Silly me – she’s killin’ folks now, and a little too casually, I might add. Meanwhile, the cops are clearly dumber without her, since their attempt to SWAT their vigilante is about as subtle as a hippo in a harem. “UP IN APARTMENT 52!” yells a cop as they jump out of cars, their sirens blaring, allowing Veronica enough time to burn evidence, pull the fire alarm, yank a hoodie down around her eyebrows and scoot right past them in the narrow stairwell. Way to cop, cops!

None of this is particularly plausible, but we should back Veronica’s endeavor more than we support John Wick’s; they’re less bloody. It’s a little difficult to reconcile the series’ anti-violence message when its hero barely bats a lash at putting a bullet through someone’s brain, but if you push past that tripwire, it’s entertaining in a slightly trashy, pulpy way. As before, each episode concludes with a PSA sharing resources for victims of abuse and violence, which arrives almost like an apology for all the violence that preceded it.

Sex and Skin: Some sweaty stylized sexy shenanigans, albeit with nary a butt nor a boob; a naked woman with her bits obscured.

Parting Shot: Veronica simmers point-blank into the camera lens.

Sleeper Star: As the clueless daughter of a rich and famous sleazemeister general, Castanho has an opportunity for a Serious Arc here – learning what’s surely the awful truth about her parents, which at this point is only hinted at.

Most Pilot-y Line: Veronica’s vow: “I have to finish what my father started.”

Our Call: For its second season, Good Morning, Veronica takes a few steps toward ludicrousness, maintaining its baseline entertainment value. If you watched the first season, then STREAM IT, because you’ll be reasonably compelled to see how far Veronica goes in the vengeance sweepstakes.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.