Apple TV+’s Dope Thief is an ugly mess

LOG is the name of ungraded digital video footage. It’s flat, lifeless, and dark, but that’s fine because you can tweak, tune, and adjust in a way that was never possible with film, fiddling with exposure, contrast, saturation, and so forth. In those days, everything had to look as good as possible on the film. But, with the ability to grade in post, fix visual effects in post, and change backgrounds and designs in post, directors started getting lazy. And eventually, some convinced themselves that ugliness is a distinct stylist choice. It’s not laziness; it’s an aesthetic.

I say all this as, in another era — an era with more care — Dope Thief could have been a great show. It has a killer central cast — with Brian Tyree Henry giving more than this role deserves as the lead — and a fun crime-caper premise. Two friends have a hustle by which they dress up as DEA agents and rob low-level drug rings and dealers. However, one day, they accidentally land on a bigger score than they expected, stealing from the wrong people, and it turns their world upside down. Oh, and they might have shot an undercover cop.

It sounds good; but the final show is this bad mix of a derivative yet silly narrative and a melodramatic, ugly “oh this is so dark and gritty” aesthetic.

You can barely see what’s happening in most scenes because the lighting is so bad, and Dope Thief’s high-contrast, low-saturation grading only makes this worse. Put bluntly, I hate how this show looks, and I wish there were more shame about filmmakers using poor lighting. Perhaps Dope Thief is trying to follow in the footsteps of their Apple TV+ brethren, Slow Horses, and be America’s black crime comedy series. But that’s a unique show, and even it goes too far into the dreary tone; particularly when a season’s villain is a French Terminator.

If the rest of the show were great, you could endure the ugliness; but, despite Brian Tyree Henry’s immense acting efforts, there’s not much here. The story is derivative and silly; the dialogue isn’t witty or entertaining; the characters are stupid and unlikeable; and you don’t want to spend time in this world. To focus on that latter point: throughout the show, our two leads stumble into various eclectic criminal groups operating in this crime ecosystem. There are the bikers, the chic Vietnamese crime professionals who hide in plain sight, a nutty Arian Juggalo gang, and the Amish. Give them Guy Ritchie banter or set John Wick loose on them, and these groups could work. But Dope Thief doesn’t have memorable dialogue, good action, or a memorable story, and these are bad guys out of cartoons. When you first hear the biker boss in the first episode, you may as well be watching Scooby Doo.

This is a fundamentally simple story type — about characters who are out of their depth, get in deep trouble, and have to try to get out of it — but Dope Thief does nothing interesting with it. It’s not funny, surprising, or particularly eventful, and the big set pieces — at the hospital, quarry, and home — feel silly and unconvincing. More generally, the show is poorly paced, with far too many moments of our characters waiting around, not doing much, being miserable.

Also, this kind of story only works if you like the lead characters, and I just didn’t. Manny — played by Wagner Moura of Narcos — is whiny, unserious but self-serious, and chronically self-pitying, and I never wanted to spend time with this character, let alone care what happened to him. Henry’s lead character, Ray, is almost worse because he’s nothing. He’s a vessel. The show shouts, “Ray is a normal guy, trying to do the right thing in a bad situation, and you, audience member, should root for me.” But it all feels insincere. Henry acts his ass off, particularly when Ray is suffering from a bad injury, but you don’t care about him, so it’s wasted energy. Ray isn’t a character but a showreel, and Bryan Tyree Henry has given far more impressive performances in Atlanta and Bullet Train anyway. Not caring about these characters also robs the show of any intention. You should care whether they get out of a situation, and survive another day, but I didn’t. There are also side characters, but you won’t care about them either, and the show wastes the talents of Ving Rhames and Dustin Nguyen.  

Dope Thief seems to want to be one part The Wire and one part The Gentleman, but it’s neither. I sat through all eight episodes, hoping it would save itself by the ending, but it didn’t. It’s a dull, ugly show, with a generic story of implausibly escalating situations that leads to an ending you don’t care about. What a shame.