Culprits: Is Gemma Arterton's Lupin-style show worth watching?
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There's a reason every streaming service has its own VOD-mandated show about the inner workings of a heist job. There's Money Heist, The Great Heist and Heist itself. Then there are the ones without the word 'heist' in the title: Lupin, The Gold, Hatton Garden and Kaleidoscope.
Danny Ocean and his odd-numbered gang of cool misfits' brand of quippy capers set to beats-driven soundtracks spawned a franchise, an all-women spin-off and now an upcoming prequel.
The new Disney+ entry Culprits manages at least to dodge the temptation of putting the word 'heist' in the title but is no less acutely aware of the stacked genre it is entering into.
Culprits sees magnetic crime maven Dianne (Gemma Arterton) and her stealth-wealth wardrobe lure in hard man Joe (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) to her crew to carry out the high-stakes heist to end all heists. But there's a twist, perhaps in service of the eight-parter's attempt to do something different, because the entry point is years down the line from the heist.
Joe has settled down among the leafy streets of a quiet Washington town with his partner and two tots. But just as he's mounting a campaign to open a new farm-to-plate bistro his quaint domesticity is upended by an assassin in a weird mask, which is only made less creepy by the fact it looks like a papier-mâché project. This weirdo is picking off the crew one by one.
With the producing heft of The Night Manager's Stephen Garrett behind the scenes, Culprits is a slick and fitting homage to heist favourites, with references aplenty to please fans of the genre.
There are also plenty of staples to give fans that warm, fuzzy feeling of familiarity, like the stylised sequences, one of which memorably involves the binmen and their industrial truck, as well as expertly choreographed fight set pieces which for the most part avoid overt silliness.
Yet in pointing to robbery-gone-wrong classics like Reservoir Dogs, it has the unfortunate side effect of leaving you wishing you were watching those films instead.
Stewart-Jarrett is a worthy lead, although he never quite manages to disappear into the character of Joe enough to forget that it's Curtis from Misfits doing an American accent. Arterton captures a cool charisma even when her dialogue feels like it's composed of Bond quips left on the cutting-room floor. The rest of the cast feel like stock characters, but that's arguably part of the heist recipe too.
The real issue with Culprits is how its bisected past and present timelines act like an X-ray machine exposing the drama's weak spot, because half the time we're trapped in a drama that simply isn't as interesting as the other half.
The play-by-play minutiae of the heist has been told ad nauseam because it's tremendously watchable, which parts of this is. But what is essentially a fizzy and fun, if trifling, story around the "Muscle" man Joe gets lost in the sober and matter-of-fact story of regular, down-to-earth Joe.
There's a lot to like here, but Culprits just can't get out of its own way.
All episodes of Culprits are available to stream on Disney+.
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