Man, Brian Tyree Henry can do anything. The star of “Atlanta,” “Causeway,” “Widows,” and “The Fire Inside” has become legitimately one of the best actors of his generation, and he furthers that kind of hyperbole with what is arguably his most demanding role to date in Apple’s “Dope Thief,” an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dennis Tafoya. A likely hit for Apple—people dig twisty shows about criminals caught in violent nightmares—one of the draws of this 8-episode first season is that the premiere was helmed by none other than the legendary Ridley Scott.
Finally back in “American Gangster” mode, Scott gives the first episode a tactile explosiveness that ends up both a blessing and a curse. “Dope Thief” is never boring, but it undeniably succumbs to a common problem of the streaming era in that one can’t help but wonder what the 150-minute film version directed by Scott would have looked like. Chapters regularly feel stretched out to meet the episode order as the show spins some wheels with underwritten side characters when we really just see Henry and his two main co-leads burst through this story like a train on fire.
Lost momentum aside, those three performances make “Dope Thief” worth a look, but my true hope is that the show is successful enough that future seasons could leave the source material and thereby correct the pacing issues that hamper a show that often feels too loyal to the elements of the first half of a novel (most of the plotting here is reportedly wrapped up in the first half of Westlake’s book) instead of telling its own story.
Ray (Henry) and Manny (a strong Wagner Moura) are a couple of low-level Philly crooks who have a regular grift that they like to run on drug houses in the area. They case the joint and burst in wearing DEA uniforms and brandishing fake badges, “confiscating” the money and drugs on the scene before the targets even realize they’re not the feds. It’s a high risk and high reward project, but Ray has a mother (Kate Mulgrew) to support and a dad (Ving Rhames) behind bars who he’d like to leave behind forever. He’s supported and given information by a local criminal powerbroker named Pham (Dustin Nguyen), but one gets the impression that Ray doesn’t want to run this game for long.
Of course, Ray’s life changes when he and Manny hit the wrong house. Shots fire, bodies drop, and the whole place goes up in flames. One of the survivors, Mina (Marin Ireland), turns out to be an actual Fed who was undercover. So now Ray & Manny have not only gotten the attention of the cartel who was running out of this house but the government who want to know what the hell just happened. Ireland is just spectacular as a woman who was already tough as nails before she became a survivor.
As everything starts to crumble around Ray, Henry turns up his physical and emotional presence in a way we haven’t really seen before. He’s great at doing the guarded character thing, telling stories with his eyes and body language, but this is closer to an action drama, and it turns out he’s also great at playing the type of dude who thinks death or arrest might be around every corner. He knows that Ray may not be the smartest guy in every room, but he’s got sharper instincts than he thinks. Like Mina, he’s a survivor too.
Doesn’t that sound like an awesome movie? I know critics are turning into a broken record in this department, but this project may be the best example of this phenomenon to date. The truth is that the death of the mid-budget feature film has led all of the screenplays that could have been in that category being turned into 8-episode TV series. There’s so much to like in “Dope Thief” but it’s all stretched so thin instead of given the chance to pile up and build momentum.
I love what Henry and Ireland (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Moura, Rhames, and Nguyen) bring to this project, but it can get illogical to see Manny and Ray wriggle out of a new life-or-death situation at the beginning of every episode. Again, I know I say this a lot, but a project like this needs momentum and that’s so difficult to find in a streaming era that seems to always think more is better. If this wasn’t going to be a film, it could have been a banger of a series at four or five episodes. As is, while the high is undeniably there, it wears off before the credits roll.
Whole series screened for review. Now on Apple TV+.