Monsieur Spade review: Clive Owen’s hardboiled performance is très magnifique

It kind of goes without saying, but here we go anyway: Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining private detective character Sam Spade in the 1941 noir classic The Maltese Falcon is one of the all-time great movie performances. Bogie’s brooding gumshoe is vulnerable and cynical at the same time, rattling off terse one-liners while trying to solve multiple mysteries, including the murder of his partner. He’s unforgettable, and few have tried to fill his fedora. That is, until now. In AMC’s slick, six-episode crime thriller Monsieur Spade, which premieres January 14, Clive Owen takes on the titular monsieur.

Like Bogart, Owen has a tired, handsome face. They both excel at playing sad sacks with gold-plated hearts. In Monsieur Spade, Owen is perpetually annoyed by humanity’s stupidity and cruelty, loping from crime scenes to cramped offices to splendid villas, digging, poking, and prodding suspects. Everyone’s a suspect is the first rule of sleuths and shamuses everywhere.

This is a perfect part for Owen, a Hollywood leading man Hollywood didn’t always know what to do with. He’s fearsome in 2004’s grim look at modern love, Closer, and haunted in Alfonso Cuarón’s celebrated 2007 dystopia Children Of Men. There was a time during those years when his name was frequently attached to the role of James Bond, but he’s denied there was ever an offer.

Monsieur Spade

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Monsieur Spade

He would have made a smashing 007. Owen’s a smoldering antihero on the big screen. He’s also distinguished himself on the small: He’s exceptional as a drug-addicted surgeon in The Knick, Steven Soderbergh’s intense medical drama set in 1900s New York City, and he’s a memorably charismatic and creepy Bill Clinton in the underrated mini-series American Crime Story: Impeachment.

And now he’s Sam Spade, older, widowed, and semi-retired, a gloomy expat living in Southern France circa 1963. This Spade is nursing a broken heart when his quiet life is shattered, and he suddenly has to break faces to find out whodunnit.

So, who did what? It’s not fair to reveal too much. Besides, the fun isn’t finding out which dastardly French person did what dirty deed, it’s watching Owen’s Spade figure it all out, in between hearty gulps of whiskey.

Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon was first published in 1929 as a serial in the popular pulp magazine Black Mask before becoming a book a year later. Monsieur Spade works well as a serial, complete with cliffhangers and mysteries inside mysteries. Every episode answers questions and then asks new ones: Who is the boy? Who shot at Spade? Are the neighbors spies? What starts as a surprisingly shocking murder slowly becomes an unexpected John LaCarre-esque tour of post-war France and Europe during the Cold War. The ghosts of the Nazi occupation still haunt the small town of Bozouls, where Spade has ended up.

Monsieur Spade also wrestles with the bloody Algerian war, too, which teaches a prescient historical lesson about colonizers and rebels, and it does so elegantly and without any moralizing. This pivot from murder mystery to political spy fiction is mostly seamless and ultimately successful. There are plenty of twists and turns and more than a few action scenes, but the real pleasure of Monsieur Spade is watching Owen outsmart, outquip, and outmatch crooks, cops, and other assorted lowlives who aren’t who they seem at first.

Owen is superb, even when his American accent occasionally falters. He can spit the rat-a-tat zingers Spade is famous for with confidence and menace; a lesser actor would sound ridiculous spouting tough guy bon mots.

Aside from Owen, the star of Monsier Spade is France itself, sun-dappled, verdant, and ancient. The series is proudly bilingual, with long stretches of dialogue in French with English subtitles. The other star is the script, written by co-creators and executive producers Tom Fontana and Scott Frank, who also directs. (Frank and Montana are Emmy-winning TV vets, with Frank co-creating The Queen’s Gambit and Fontana showrunning City On A Hill.)

The script honors Hammett’s quickfire prose and dialogue, and while the plot can get tangled, it never takes long for our exhausted hero to show up and untangle it. The plot adds up—eventually—but there are lots of parts, maybe one too many flashbacks, or subplots, or characters. (Why is there a Da Vinci Code-esque monk-assassin? Well, the more the merrier.)

The cast is stacked with character actors who are either friends or enemies of Spade. Louise Bourgoin’s Chief of Police, Patrice Michaud, is a witty bulldog who’s a perfect foil for Owen’s mouthy but tight-lipped private eye. Spade loves two women, one played by the sophisticated Chiara Mastroianni, the other by Cara Bossom’s Teresa, an impetuous young girl who has no one to turn to but Spade. And as villainous Philippe Saint-Andre, Jonathan Zaccaï is having a good time playing une merde.

A random cameo from a multiple Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actor in the finale adds energy to an otherwise satisfying ending. Is it the end? Hopefully not. But AMC should hurry up: Monsieur Spade is a smart, thoughtful, two-fisted resurrection of a valuable intellectual property due to enter the public domain in 2026.

Monsieur Spade premieres January 14 on AMC