Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor
Sugar
Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99(monthly subscription rate)
Genre-bending neo-noir.
JohnSugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigatorwho is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. Heis also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) ofhis cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (asfar as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I supposethey can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used themto teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friendHenry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be anacademic by reading campus novels.
Forme, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eyeor latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heartof gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I nevertook to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he isan actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in MiamiVice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2(2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man onFire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).
Whyam I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’swonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit onethat is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoidspoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror).There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common,but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to itsconclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’truin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous.Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhapsbetter.
The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching.***
