Colin Farrell’s ‘Sugar’ Is a Clumsy, Cliché L.A. Noir With a Baffling Twist: TV Review
05.04.2024 - 14:35
/ variety.com
Alison Herman TV Critic If John Sugar, the PI played by a gravel-voiced Colin Farrell in the eponymous crime drama “Sugar,” seems like too much a collection of noir clichés and male fantasies to be a plausible protagonist, that’s partly by design. But the Apple TV+ series, created by screenwriter Mark Protosevich (“I Am Legend,” Spike Lee’s “Oldboy”), executive produced by Audrey Chon (“The Twilight Zone” reboot, “Invasion”) Simon Kinberg (the original “Mr.
& Mrs. Smith,” “Dark Phoenix”) and directed by Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener,” “The Two Popes”), doesn’t reveal its true nature until far too late in the game — at which point a clumsy twist introduces an entirely new premise with little in the way of legible buildup or coherent follow-through.
Until then, viewers spend the better part of the eight-episode season trudging through a rote mystery weighed down by clumsy dialogue and wooden performances. It’s likely many won’t reach the twist at all, and they won’t be any worse off for doing so.
We first meet Sugar in Tokyo, where a black-and-white prologue establishes the freelancer as an expert in discreetly finding missing persons. After tracking down the kidnapped child of a yakuza boss, Sugar is quickly recalled to Los Angeles, where his insistence on wearing a suit in a sea of athleisure instantly evokes Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” But rather than simply riff on recognizable motifs from detective fiction and classic film, “Sugar” is far more overt and less creative in incorporating its influences.
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