‘Culprits’ Review: Hulu’s Well-Acted Heist Series Struggles to Finish the Job
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Abstract art plays a featured role in the first few episodes of Hulu’s new heist drama Culprits. A Rothko exhibit is the site of an early meeting between two aspiring criminals, and the artist’s canvases are a topic of conversation. A later episode walks through a full room of striking works, a Mondrian here, a Kandinsky there. Nobody discusses the paintings this time, but London is full of places to hold meetings, so this interest on series creator J Blakeson’s part feels more than incidental.
Like many things in Culprits, however, the eye for 20th-century masterworks ends up being more of a red herring than a fascination with substance, a burst of color or geometry to attract the eye more than a point of thematic resonance. Despite a fragmented narrative and a couple of interesting characters, very little in Culprits feels all that modern and nothing so much as flirts with abstraction.
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It won’t hurt Culprits that the series’ first five or six episodes are fairly routine heist business, boosted by a strong cast of actors, many of whom feel like they should have been big stars long ago. It’s engaging and fast-moving, if never surprising.
What will hurt the series, a Disney+ or Star original for much of the world, is how flat and vaguely smug the last two episodes are, despite a welcome late-season cameo from Eddie Izzard as part of an abrupt twist that the writers mistake for timeliness.
First among equals in the Culprits ensemble is Misfits and Generation favorite Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, introduced as aspiring small-town family man Joe. Engaged to marry Kevin Vidal’s Jules and happily bonding with Jules’ two small kids, Joe is mainly worried about getting proper zoning clearances for the abandoned hardware store he’s hoping to turn into a cozy bistro.
But Joe is not actually “Joe” at all. He’s actually David, a lifelong criminal from London, and he’s hidden a duffel bag full of pristine currency near his new Washington home, part of an audacious vault heist pulled off three years earlier. On the eve of COVID — somewhat a plot point, but never meaningfully — David was recruited to serve as muscle for a job orchestrated by mastermind Dianne Harewood (Gemma Arterton).
The stylishly menacing Dianne has put together a team of experts lured by the possibility of a payday in the “low-sevens.” Because this is a heist show/movie, the experts have been assigned cheeky nicknames reflecting their duties. Joe/David is Muscle. Dianne is Brains. There’s fast-talking Officer (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), self-explanatory Driver (Vincent Riotta), the sociopathic assassin known as Specialist (Niamh Algar), adroit lock-picker Greaseman (Tara Abboud) and others entrusted with munitions, logistics and post-mission medical care.
And because this is a heist show/movie, nothing goes exactly as planned, but amid the chaos, most of our anti-heroes take some share of cash and go on the run. Three years later, an unnamed killer (a creepy Ned Dennehy) is picking off members of the team. Since none of them know who the original target even was, it’s up to them to reunite and get answers before they’re all dead.
Along the way, as the action unfolds in the present, we see the heist and its lead-up playing out in flashbacks that, no matter what anybody involved thinks, aren’t presented in any way that could be construed as artistic, much less abstract. The storytellers are just withholding information to confuse viewers. At least Netflix’s Kaleidoscope, with its choose-your-own-linearity format, had the courage of its cubist convictions, however average it was otherwise.
There are no shocks in Culprits, as every ostensible reveal, every double-cross, every seemingly dead character proving to still be alive drew a shrug from me. I was even less impressed by the self-serious “Eat the Rich!” turn the series takes in the homestretch, as if the heist genre wasn’t always rooted in Robin Hood storytelling. I had a similar problem with Blakeson’s I Care a Lot — winner of a still-strange Golden Globe for Rosamund Pike — in that it’s scathing, but in an ultimately superficial way. Of course, by the time it gets to what it suddenly decides was its point all along, Culprits is already reduced to working its way down a list of thriller clichés — using a corpse to activate facial recognition software? Check! A character using a networked video game’s chat function in lieu of a confiscated cell phone? Check!
The disappointing part is that Stewart-Jarrett makes it really easy to care about the main storyline, mixing a cocky star swagger in his action scenes with an effective sweetness in the Joe-Jules story, which feels effortlessly romantic and progressive. Throw in Howell-Baptiste’s very funny loquacious gab, Arterton’s enigmatic iciness, Elgar’s deliciously off-kilter viciousness and a believably raw turn from Abboud and there’s a good core here, one diminished by the strained logic as the series progresses. Yes, I know that long-form heist dramas have become a Peak TV standard, but I’ll always feel that this is a genre that thrives on elegant containment and that runs the risk of becoming… well… this. You either stick a landing or a lot of good-will goes sour.
Why is Cuprits eight hours long? Because characters talk like this: “Nobody gives a shit about the truth,” babbles one third-tier baddie. “People only care about the weight of the voice that’s speaking it. In this town, my voice is like heavy metal raining from the sky. It’s a fucking explosion. Your voice isn’t shit. In fact, it’s less than shit. When I say something, it’s believed. When you say something, it’s nothing.”
Imagining David Mamet, who knows a thing or two about telling stories exactly like this in a more satisfying 90 minutes, taking a red pen to all the repetitious dialogue in Culprits — or the text of this review — is as entertaining as the series itself.
With Blakeson directing the first half of the series as well, Culprits is technically assured. It’s a show that wants to be globe-trotting, despite very little international shooting. But thanks to carefully selected interiors, eagle-eyed location scouting and exceptional costumes from Ian Fulcher, Culprits is a generally good-looking show that avoids feeling like most of the action is taking place in generic corners of Ontario (which it is). Mostly the set-pieces are fine, if genre-standard, though there is one very good scene involving Joe using his home’s security cameras to thwart a home invasion that I found really well-done.
Is it possible that some viewers will feel invested enough after five episodes to maintain enthusiasm through the less-than-lackluster conclusion? Yes, but by the end I felt like I was watching a child’s haphazard finger-painting much more than the work of a modernist master.
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