Culprits is the latest heist thriller to land on a streaming service. This one is from J Blakeson, who previously dabbled with high-octane amorality in the hugely enjoyable 2020 film I Care a Lot. It is the sort of TV that will inevitably be called “slick”: it is highly stylised and whips along at a pace; it looks great and the cast is fantastic. In all its glossy richness, though, it also manages to sneak in a few intriguing horror-adjacent ideas that offer greater depth than you might expect.
It divides its attentions between three timelines, BEFORE (the heist), THEN (during the heist) and NOW, each stamped on the screen in yellow capital letters every time it jumps from era to era. In the before times, a gang of elite criminal masterminds has been assembled by Gemma Arterton’s uber-villain, Dianne Harewood, who needs them to work together to crack a seemingly impenetrable vault and steal £30m. They will be paid handsomely for their parts in the job, but they will also have to disappear into the ether, leaving their old lives behind once it is done.
Dianne claims that they will be stealing from “fat cats” who have hidden their wealth. Culprits is not naturalistic at the best of times, but this really does stretch credulity – corporate fat cats aren’t having to hide much of anything under this British government.
The gang members have functional, noir-ish nicknames depending on their role: Brain, Soldier, Driver and Right Hand, among many others. (It’s a big job.) Our way in is Muscle, played by Misfits’ Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. In the present, he is a stepfather, living in domestic bliss with his partner and trying to open a bistro in a rundown part of town, somewhere in Oregon. But a late-night hit-and-run sets off a chain of events that coincides horribly with his previous life and starts to bring the ghosts of his past to the surface.
It turns out that a mysterious professional killer is hunting down the gang members and picking them off. It is a curious and clever choice to situate the main heist in the past. From very early on, we know that Muscle has an enormous bag of banknotes, which implies that they pulled off the job. But Culprits is slow to reveal what went down that day; the consequences become clear incrementally.
Getting the old gang back together, as heist narratives must do, is more stressful when they are breaking cover only to work out who is trying to kill them. It weaves a web of ever-increasing paranoia. Is it an outsider? Is it the people from whom they stole the money? Could it be one of their own? Honour among thieves is a loose concept here.
The lurid amorality of this world is rendered in bright, bold colours. In some respects, it has a graphic-novel boldness. There are blueprints and big steampunk-style safes. There are exquisitely choreographed blowouts and thrilling fights and chases. It travels from the US to England, Norway, France and Spain. It feels big and confident. The cast is excellent, from Arterton (who appears to be channelling a combination of St Vincent and Judi Dench’s M) to Kirby Howell-Baptiste as the golden-tongued swindler Officer and Niamh Algar as the trigger-happy assassin Specialist, more accurately known to her colleagues as Psycho.
Stewart-Jarrett holds it all together impeccably as Muscle, or Joe, or David, depending on which life he is leading. As a black man living in the US, his interactions with authority figures, from the suspicious police officers to the board of officials looking over his restaurant proposals, take on an added air of menace and hypervigilance. When Muscle has a run-in with one of the town’s self-appointed baddies, a rich white man, this is made explicit – “The law doesn’t see you, it only protects you,” he says – but it is even more powerful when it is implied, adding yet another layer of tension to the impending danger.
Elsewhere, subtlety goes out of the window. This is a violent show. It inhabits the same gory world as Luther, aiming to get away with its extreme bloodthirstiness by trying to suggest that its violence is cartoonish. People wield machine guns on the streets of London as if they are a mild inconvenience to passersby, while some of the nasty torture scenes require a stronger stomach than mine to endure.
Even so, in an era saturated with heist thrillers, Culprits is one of the good ones: smart, exciting and very, well, slick.
• Culprits is on Disney+.
