'Sugar' Review: In a Lonely Place With Colin Farrell

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April 5, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

This much I can tell you: Colin Farrell plays a private detective in “Sugar.” He has a license. We see it being handed to him and everything.

I can also tell you that his character, John Sugar, is not an ordinary private detective, in ways that go beyond his fetishization of the film noir heroes he emulates. But I can’t really get into it because “Sugar” — which premieres Friday on Apple TV+ with two of its eight episodes — is a show with a congenital vulnerability to spoilers.

The show is the first television project of Mark Protosevich, whose short list of screenplays across more than two decades includes “I Am Legend” and Spike Lee’s remake of the South Korean revenge drama “Oldboy.” Based on “Sugar,” it is fair to guess that he shares his protagonist’s obsession with noir.

The show opens with a short black-and-white preamble, set in Tokyo, that echoes the premise of Akira Kurosawa’s great 1963 crime thriller “High and Low.” Then Sugar returns to his home base in Los Angeles and steps into the plot of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” agreeing to look for the missing granddaughter of a legendary Hollywood producer, Jonathan Siegel. The intimidating mogul is played by James Cromwell, who serves as a living link to another obvious influence, Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential.”

The genre worship goes beyond that kind of easy homage, however. Sugar is an acolyte of classic noir, watching the old films at every opportunity and discussing them in Farrell’s genre-obligatory voice-over narration. Bolder yet, scenes of Sugar in action are intercut with clips from iconic films. A threat of violence is carried out, in tandem, by Farrell and Robert Mitchum (“The Night of the Hunter”); a nighttime drive across Los Angeles by Farrell and Amy Ryan, who plays a woman caught up in Sugar’s case, is shared with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame (“In a Lonely Place”).

These frequent past-in-present moments are probably not as exciting or sensual as they were in Protosevich’s imagination, but they do the job thematically: We see that the codes of noir and the lonely heroism of the private eye have shaped what it means to be a man for Sugar, a do-gooder with an aversion to gunplay.

And in the Hollywood matrix of the story — which expands to include Siegel’s son (Dennis Boutsikaris), a producer of trashy action flicks, and grandson (Nate Corddry), a debauched actor — everyone is doing their best to play a role that they think flatters them, including the industry machers, their family members, the hangers-on and Sugar himself. In juxtaposed scenes, the grandson, after a tough day on set, and Sugar, after a rough day at the office, both promise to do better tomorrow. Life is a soundstage, my friend.

As the early episodes of the show unfold, its success seems to depend on how well Protosevich and his crew, including the directors Adam Arkin and Fernando Meirelles, will balance the figurative with the real, the celebration of genre and medium with the actual day-to-day mystery. That the story, at every turn, reminds you of L.A. noirs you have seen before is exactly the point. But unless you are an unquestioning devotee yourself, the appeal of this kind of meta-nostalgia goes only as far as the deftness and emotional heft of its execution. And we’re not talking about “The Singing Detective” here.

On balance, though, “Sugar” has sufficient compensations, particularly in its cast. Farrell gives a relaxed and engaging, movie-star-on-his-day-off performance; moving through sunny Southern California in a dark suit and tie, he invokes both the tortured cool of Bogart and the offbeat, man-out-of-time equanimity of Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.” Ryan is good, as you would expect, in a role custom-made for her, a kindhearted former pop star who discovers that she can play the hard-boiled tough dame.

But there are signs from the beginning that Sugar is not the simple L.A. private eye stereotype that he appears to be, and that “Sugar” has more than one genre on its mind. The gumshoe has issues with his vision and mobility; he has an unusual facility for languages; he has cryptic conversations with his handler, Ruby, who appears to run a stable of operatives. (Ruby is played with disarming disingenuousness by Kirby, who went by Kirby Howell-Baptiste when she played the acting student Sasha in “Barry.”)

The hints of spy or conspiracy thriller that waft around the edges of the detective story become more insistent until they break into the open fairly late in the season, in a reveal that is most likely to sharply divide opinions (assuming Apple has maintained spoiler control) and to drive away viewers who were happy with the show as a noir nostalgia-fest. At that point, “Sugar” becomes an entirely different kind of show, making the exercise of writing about it now faintly ridiculous. Yet to its credit, it also remains an L.A. noir, in mood and morals, to the end. You have to admire it, if only for Protosevich’s chutzpah in trying to pull it off.

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