Smoke review: Like a Mahesh Bhatt thriller with an Apple-level budget and an MX Player vibe | Web-series News

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After knocking it out of the park with the excellent prison drama Black Bird a couple of years ago, writer Dennis Lehane and star Taron Egerton have reunited on the new Apple mini-series Smoke. The nine-episode thriller follows a mismatched pair of investigators tasked with tracking down a couple of arsonists. Gudsen, the character played by Egerton, is an expert of some kind. He lives and breathes fire. His new partner Calderon, played by Jurnee Smollett, is a detective with a horrific past. In a contrived piece of writing that even Mahesh Bhatt would have drawn the line at, it is revealed that Calderon’s mother tried to set their house ablaze when she was a child. It’s like Dexter, with an Apple-level budget but the soul of an MX Player original.

Something so bonkers happens at the end of the second episode that you wouldn’t know what to do. Should you applaud the ‘ambition’, or should you feel annoyed at being tricked? To be clear, this isn’t a great twist, even though it influences everything that happens afterwards. It is, in fact, deceptive to the point of being damaging. You’d expect a writer of Lehane’s pedigree to have avoided such tactics; he’s better than this, as he has proven numerous times in the past. Remember, when a film or a show gets us to spend some alone time with the protagonist, with nobody else around, it is signing a silent pact with the audience. It’s telling us that the protagonist can be trusted, unless there has been some prior indication of them being unreliable. In Smoke, however, you’ll feel cheated after episode two.

Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett in Apple’s Smoke.

And that’s because the twist undermines everything we’d seen in the two-odd hours preceding it. Smoke is a slovenly paced, cliche-ridden mess that doesn’t know if it wants to be a goofy send-up of TV crime dramas or if it wants to be something more serious; something that meets the high benchmark that Lehane has set for himself with stories such as Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It ends up being neither, falling in the Zero Day zone of streaming TV that has no idea how ridiculous it all is. Just because the show has the glossy sheen of an expensive Apple production doesn’t mean that it isn’t a mid-2000s network drama in disguise.

Egerton plays the arson expert with typical flair. He’s quite a nice choice for the part, which isn’t as straightforward as you’re initially led to believe. Gudsen has an almost romantic view of fire; he’s so consumed by it that he has decided to write a book based on his experiences. We catch him narrating it on his device in his moments of solitude. He seems to be really pleased with how it’s coming along, and also deeply embarrassed to talk about it with Calderon, who’s shown to be tough as nails. It’s a rather on-the-nose subversion of gender roles, until the twist rolls around.

The thing with a show like Smoke is that, after the big reveal, you’re left with no real reason to continue watching. Unless, of course, you enjoy looking at semi-intelligent people run around in circles and follow false leads. Smoke seems to be aware of this issue, as it concocts a handful of subplots for the characters to distract themselves with. Then, a mysterious third person shows up. Played by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, his name is Freddy and he works as a line cook at a fast food restaurant. He’s the sort of person who has somehow survived four decades on this planet without drawing attention to himself. He lurks in the shadows; he blends in with the furniture. And that’s how he likes it.

But when a chatty customer pushes him to get a haircut and chase that promotion he’s been ignoring, it ignites something in him. Smoke attempts to investigate how monsters are created. Are they born, or are they a product of their environment? Are they introverts or extroverts? To be clear, it answers neither of these questions with any sort of depth. If anything, the show appears to lean further into B-movie buffoonery as it goes along. The actors are clearly stranded, under the impression that they’re working on a prestige project. You can’t really blame Egerton or Smollett, who do their best to give Gudsen and Calderon chemistry.

Jurnee Smollett in a still from Apple’s Smoke.

But it’s as if portions of the script were withheld from them. There is a dissonance in the show’s tone that spills over onto their characters, and, consequently, their performances. When Black Bird was released in 2022, there was a sense that Apple was onto something, delivering one all-timer after another. It was the greatest streak that a ‘network’ had been on since AMC in the late 2000s, or HBO a decade before that. But as the streamer embraces the Netflix model, it must also prepare itself for criticism that it had previously avoided.

Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a ‘Rotten Tomatoes-approved’ critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police.

You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at [email protected]. He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. … Read More

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