Culprits, Disney+, review: This thriller can’t pull off its own heist

A good heist isn’t just about stealing the loot. As Disney’s new thriller Culprits proves, it’s the getting away with it that counts.

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Misfits) is Joe, a suburban stepdad whose wholesome flannel-shirted American family life is rudely interrupted when his unsavoury past as a robber rears its head. Three years previously, Joe was better known as “Muscle”, recruited by Diane (Gemma Arterton, Funny Woman), a perfectly coiffed but one-note criminal mastermind, to her crack team of crooks for a job that would bank him millions and set him up with an entirely new identity.

But the good life didn’t last long and now, as demonstrated by the brutal opening – in which a man is shot in the head at his plush Italian villa – a mysterious masked man is hunting down each of the gang.

Culprits is a stylish production with satisfyingly bloody action sequences (prepare for some real nastiness – the up-close throat slitting is particularly gruesome), classy backdrops and a comic book sensibility (props to the props department for some deeply unsettling masks).

The magnetic Stewart-Jarrett should have more lead roles – here, he is soft yet steely and has great chemistry with his fellow thieves, especially Kirby Howell-Baptiste (The Sandman) as the crew’s slippery sweet-talker “Officer” and Tara Abboud as volatile young safe-cracker, Azar.

The enticing opening episode has great potential, building intrigue by weaving Joe’s idyllic present with snippets of his violent past. As long as you’re willing to get on board with some requisite genre silliness (Arterton literally wearing a belted trench coat and black leather gloves; the crew’s nicknames – “Fixer”, “Greaseman”, “Right Hand”; and even a heart-thumping contemporary take on the Star Wars trash compactor scene), it’s glossy and gripping stuff.

But as we begin to bounce frantically back and forth in time, being drip-fed details of the heist interspersed with the cartoonish thrills of a present-day rampage, the shadowy assassin hits his marks with more accuracy than the show itself.

Hampered by plotting that becomes increasingly unwieldy, Culprits is missing the snappy script and point of view of writer-director J Blakeson’s black comedy feature film I Care A Lot.

Despite Stewart-Jarrett’s emotional heft, it’s hard to stay invested in Joe’s home life, especially through a quickly redundant subplot involving a feud with a local bigwig that feels plucked from a different show altogether, one more overtly interested in Joe’s relative lack of power as a gay, Black man. This is part of a slightly unsatisfying recurring thread of social commentary that Culprits doesn’t fully realise.

It’s no surprise that the show shares a producer with Killing Eve and there are a few too many hand-me-down elements, like the time-hopping, globe-trotting narrative signposted by blocky, bright yellow title cards. There is even a chic, psychopathic blonde killer who, despite Niamh Algar’s substantial talent, can’t help but feel like an echo of Villanelle.

As the thriller reaches its conclusion, finally unveiling Eddie Izzard’s sinister role along with some of the dry humour that the previous episodes were lacking, it transpires that the heist, like Joe, was not exactly as it seemed.

Culprits has most clarity when assessing the various motivations people may have for doing very, very bad things: self-preservation, social justice, to protect the ones we love or just sheer greed. But with too-long 55-minute episodes and flagging momentum, it’s a big ask of the audience to hang on until the end (especially one that seems, at the last, to lose faith in the idea of consequence in favour of sentimentalism).

There is flair, fun and finesse here, particularly in the performance and staging, but overall, Culprits is a stickup series that doesn’t quite pull off the heist.