Culprits Review

Culprits, a new British thriller, isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s a show that knows the story it is telling isn’t particularly novel – we’ve all seen stories like this one before – but it’s determined to provide us with exceptional performances, great direction, strong fight choreography, and compelling characters in order to take a rather simple tale and elevate it to something special. And that’s precisely what it does.

We’re introduced to our protagonist, Joe (a great Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, carrying a lot of the emotional heavy lifting of the narrative with aplomb), who lives in Washington state with his fiancé, Jules (a very good Kevin Vidal), and Jules’ two young children. He’s working on opening a new bistro in town when he gets into a car accident that puts him in the crosshairs of the town’s rich asshole. However, Joe also has a unique set of skills of his own – and a massive bag of English pounds – and we start to get the feeling that something is off here. Well, it turns out that this life of Joe’s, well, it all came about after he went into hiding following a heist job back in England that went a bit pear shaped. Oh, and there’s a masked assassin tracking down the other members of the heist team and killing them off one by one in hopes of getting information on where the mastermind of the heist – that would be Gemma Arterton’s Dianne Harewood, aka Brain – is hiding.

The series is constructed as a web of sorts, with the story jumping from the present (denoted as Now in on-screen text), to the planning on the heist (denoted as Before on screen), and to the heist itself (denoted at Then). The on-screen text makes it pretty simple to follow the story, and it helps that the writing isn’t trying to throw us off the scent of some major twist – it’s telling it like it is. We meet the team (which includes a silver-tongued con artist known as Officer – a great Kirby Howell-Baptiste, a cold-blooded sharpshooter named Specialist (or, to some on the team, Psycho for her seemingly emotionless ability to kill) – Niamh Algar, who, for my money, is giving us the most interesting performance of the cast, and Azar Mizouni, aka Greaseman, who is one of two on the safe-cracking team – Tara Abboud, doing great work) and it’s in the incredible performances of this eclectic group that things really take off. Sure, we care about Joe aka David aka Muscle and the lengths he will go to in order to protect his family from the danger they face thanks to his past, but it’s the remaining members of the heist team who offer the most complexity in terms of character and performance.

Think about it. When you recall a great heist film you’ve seen, you probably don’t really remember the characters outside of a central one or two, right? You might remember that there was the guy who was the inside man or the tech specialist, but it’s hard to recall complex details of the various characters within the heist itself. It also doesn’t help that most of those stories are actually about the heist and not the aftermath – wherein you get a chance to see more about the characters outside of their role in the heist – whereas with Culprits, you get the planning, the heist itself, and the story of the remaining team members trying to stop an assassin before he kills them all off. It’s a pretty strong hook made into a pretty great series thanks to the strength of the performances contained within it.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a hell of a cast with some heavy hitters – Stewart-Jarrett, Arterton, and Howell-Baptiste chief among them. But top to bottom, everyone here makes the most of their chance to shine. Abboud and Algar, in particular, are absolutely sensational and steal the scene whenever they are on-screen (which, thankfully, is often). Algar manages to find the humanity in a character who could easily be one-note, while Abboud shows a steely reserve that you might not expect from the youngest of the heist team, holding her own on-screen with much older and more well-known actors. But the story, ultimately, belongs to Stewart-Jarrett and Muscle, and the actor is engaging as all get out. The writing could turn Muscle into a bleeding heart or blame him for the threat he’s brought into the lives of his step-children and fiancé. However, it makes sure never to assign complete blame or fully absolve him for everything he has done and will do. It’s a tricky needle to thread – make your protagonist just sympathetic enough to give us a rooting interest, but never let the audience forget that he chose this particular job knowing the potential consequences – but Culprits absolutely nails it.

When I started the series, I was expecting a run of the mill heist story. But I was pleasantly surprised with the caliber of series we ended up getting. Yes, it’s pretty darn violent, but if you can stomach a bit of bloodshed and death, it’s an incredibly engaging ride with a stellar cast to boot. Culprits is a sleeper hit waiting to happen this winter.

Culprits premieres on December 8 on Hulu (in the US – it is currently available on Disney+ in the UK). All eight episodes of the series were provided for review.