Streaming in February: assassins, corrupt cops, snowscape survival, more

PRIME: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mr. & Mrs. Smith made its mark in cinema history in 2005 as the cause of one marriage’s ruin and the genesis of a new, equally temporary one. It also spawned the nickname “Brangelina” for stars Pitt and Jolie. But as a movie, it was crap: a lazy, high-concept package that leaned on the worst of cinematic (and American) tendencies: It solved its characters’ problems with boring scenes of the title characters mowing their way out of jams with endless rounds of bullets. The movie was supposed to be about wily assassins, but these two rarely relied more on gunpower than their wits. It deserved a remake, not because of its strengths but because of its weaknesses and unfulfilled potential. 

Maybe that’s what drew co-creator Donald Glover of Atlanta to the material. His six-part limited series, dropping on Prime Video February 2, infuses the notion of lethal armed agents working for a shadowy company with a healthy dose of situationship comedy and a gig-economy mindset. Best of all, it showcases the unexpected chemistry of its leads, a prickly-puppyish combo. 

The show’s start makes you worry you’re in for a mindless retread of the original. In a prologue, a movie-star-gorgeous couple (the male half played by a famous Swedish actor) gets ambushed by a bunch of masked assassins, distinguished only by the blaze of their boringly endless gunfire. Luckily, the real show then kicks in, introducing us (and each other) to John (Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) Smith. Hired by an undefined but not a governmental agency, they’re well-paid to execute whatever mission an anonymous source they call “Hihi” (based on the sender’s standard text greeting) assigns them. They’re compensated for their high-risk, often murderous, work with a killer brownstone in Manhattan. But they also have to pose, and ultimately perform, as a married couple, which includes negotiating the power dynamics that come with all that. 

Compulsively watchable, this show mixes the slick surfaces we expect from espionage escapism with some grubby reality from the New York streets, plus the daily grind of interpersonal relationships. While one episode, set around Lake Como in Italy, gives us the street chases and pyrotechnics we’d expect from a vintage James Bond, several of the episodes settle down to focus on the Smiths’ emotional development, misunderstandings and teasing interplay. The mix creates an interesting texture. The show includes sharp turns by Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson, Sharon Horgan, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Michaela Coel and especially Wagner Moura and Parker Posey as another couple of Smiths. 

Sure, no matter its pleasures, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is ultimately disposable entertainment with questionable morals. And its last episode features a couple of familiar pop culture cliches. First, there’s one of those gun-happy shooting sprees the series mainly avoids. Second, that mayhem happens because of a misunderstanding between characters that could have been avoided if they’d just, you know, talked to each other. Other than those blips, the show is one of the nicest surprises of the early year. 

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PRIME: Expats

It’s a shame no one saw Nicole Kidman, virtually unrecognizable, playing a hard-worn, corrupt detective in Karyn Kusama’s downbeat Destroyer. If that 2018 movie had gotten a little more love, maybe Kidman wouldn’t have started stranding herself in limited series, playing variants of the same sort of wealthy woman, swanning picturesquely through domestic crises. Think Big Little Lies, The Undoing and now Expats, the six-episode adaptation of a Janice Y.K. Lee novel, continuing Fridays through February 23. 

She plays Margaret, wife of a Japanese American husband (Brian Tee) assigned to Hong Kong for work. A landscape designer with her career put on hold, Margaret feels stymied playing mom. Discontent turns tragic when the smallest of her three kids goes missing. She blames a young Korean American, Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), who was in charge of the boy at the time. Rounding out the story is a third woman, Margaret’s high-rise neighbor Hilary (Sarayu Blue), who’s married to an alcoholic who happens to be sleeping with Mercy. 

A couple of episodes into the good-looking series, directed by The Farewell’s Lulu Wang, I realized that this trying-to-have-it-all female ennui just isn’t currently in my wheelhouse. So I bailed. Viewers situated more comfortably in the show’s target demographic are likely to have a better time. Also, though it’s probably uncool to dwell too much on it, Kidman is playing a character at least 10 years younger than her actual age. It strains credibility in a show that already feels synthetic. 

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NETFLIX: Society of the Snow and American Nightmare 

Though, for me, his best movie remains the melancholy Spanish ghost tale The Orphanage, director J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible was also strong — a grueling take on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He returns to disaster/survival mode with Society of the Snow. One of the five Oscar nominees for best international feature this year, it’s the true story of the 1972 crash in the Andes of a plane carrying 45 passengers and crew, most of them rugby players. (The story got a previous screen treatment with 1993’s Alive, with an American cast including Ethan Hawke.) 

Here, actual Spanish-speaking actors play the Uruguayan survivors, beset by freezing temperatures and avalanches as they huddle in their plane’s wrecked fuselage. Forgotten by the outside world, they soon understand that hunger is their biggest threat — and so are their Catholic teachings as regards the sanctity of the human body. 

In telling the story, the film is, if anything, too successful in conveying the misery of the predicament. An unexpected decision by the filmmakers to focus on one man, Numa (Enzo Vogrincic), raises the movie to a metaphysical/poetic level near the end. The movie could have used more surprises of its kind. Otherwise, Society is a movie I respect more than recommend. 

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For a different serving of factual horror — more engrossing, in its awful way — check out Netflix’ three-part documentary series American Nightmare. In the spring of 2015, the 911 dispatcher in Vallejo, California, fields a weird call from a man reporting the kidnapping of his girlfriend. He sounds strangely calm. Understandably, the police interrogate Aaron Quinn, the caller, about Denise Huskins’ disappearance. Statistically, the perpetrators of crimes most often turn out to be people closest to the victims. As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Henry Lee, who covered the case, said, “It’s always the boyfriend.” 

So far so normal. But as law officers keep Aaron in the interrogation room, give him a polygraph test and then lie to him about the results, things start to look messed up in a whole new way. Yes, it’s a weird story Aaron tells police: Some guy broke into the bedroom, doped him and Denise with cold medicine, slapped blacked-out swim goggles over their faces and then carried Denise out to his car trunk. 

We know Denise survived the event. She co-narrates the documentary with Aaron. So Nightmare is less a whodunnit than it is a WTF-were-they-thinking? The “they” in question are a police force that jumped to conclusions and put both victims in the line of fire when they should have been searching for the actual abductor. 

Considering that Aaron and Denise are a photogenic, White couple with means who still got badly played leaves you pondering how many more people in less secure social, ethnographic and economic situations get steamrolled by the law. 

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MAX: True Detective: Night Country 

After a five-year hiatus, True Detective returns with a spooky new six-episode installment. Aptly subtitled Night Country, it unfolds in Arctic Alaska during the holiday season, when Santa may be in the sky, but the sun never is. Jodie Foster, entertainingly foulmouthed, plays Police Chief Danvers in a nowhere burg named Ennis. 

Other than bars, the main source of employment is a mining operation that feeds half the town and infuriates the other half — the indigenous population who see it as a source of exploitation and pollution. Into this shadowy climate comes a mystery when most of the seven scientists from a secretive research station nearby turn up naked and frozen in the snow. Somehow, this “corpsesicle” may be connected to the murder six years ago of a local woman who was the mine’s biggest foe. The cop who investigated and failed to finger the killer, Navarro (pro boxer turned actor Kali Reis), bulldozes her way into the dead-scientists case, clashing entertainingly with Danvers. They have history.

Continuing Sundays through February 25, Night Country’s first three episodes can’t seem to decide if this is a regular police procedural made exotic with all the snow and darkness, or if it’s a mystical exploration of native traditions versus White culture’s rapacious ways. Throwing in a one-eyed polar bear, a ghost who communicates through modern dance and suicidal caribou, there’s a lot of woo-woo stuff going on. But Foster and Reis’ clashes are entertaining, and the fine supporting cast includes Fiona Shaw, Chris Eccleston and John Hawkes. 

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LOOSE ENDS

It’s been around a few months, but the heist series Culprits on Hulu is a lot of ludicrous fun. Joe (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) just wants to lead a wholesome life as a restaurateur and husband to a widowed dad of two in Washington State. But wouldn’t you know, he’s secretly a British criminal operative in hiding after an absolutely fabulous job three years ago, stealing a gob of money from an ancient vault in London. But now, his colleagues in the crime are starting to get murdered.

As the show’s timeline jumps back and forth — between now, where Joe tries to find the killer, and then, where we see the robbery as it’s undertaken — we meet his old team. They’re experts at various illegal skills, given code names (his is Muscle). The most amusing of these is the inveterate liar known as Officer, played by the tremendously entertaining Kirby Howell-Baptiste. Their lethal taskmaster? Dianne, with the perfect white skin of a corpse and makeup that looks like it takes six hours to apply. Gemma Arterton plays her like a high-camp anime villainess. She’s ridiculous, and so is Culprits . . . in a good way. 

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On Netflix, the series The Brothers Sun, like Disney+’s American Born Chinese before it, tries to give Michelle Yeoh the sort of showcase she deserves. She plays the California mother of normal, geeky college kid Bruce (Sam Song Li, overdoing the geeky stuff) and a slick older son Charles (Justin Chien), who returns from Taiwan where he helps run the real family business. Unknown to Bruce, the Suns are gangsters, and a rival clan seems to be gunning for them. The show’s mix of frequent “humorous” violence, the kind that works in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, stumbles here, especially since the show seems to be pitched at a younger viewership.  

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Also on Netflix, comedian Mike Birbiglia’s solo show The Old Man and the Pool is a charming, charmingly brief exploration of the sort of adventures with health hiccups that arise with middle age. If you don’t find it relatable, you’re young or lucky or both. 

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.