Streaming in September: “The Sandman,” “Uncoupled,” “House of the Dragon,” more

There’s something both entrancing and disappointing about the novels and stories of Neil Gaiman. He’s a champion-level world builder, leading us into fascinating fantasy realms: a mirror city under London’s Underground (Neverwhere), or a fairy land where witches are real and celestial bodies fall to earth in human form (Stardust), or a parallel reality where a girl meets an “other mother” who wants to replace her eyes with buttons (Coraline), or a U.S. landscape peppered with mythical deities living kinky lives alongside us drab mortals (American Gods).

That last novel got a three-season Starz TV adaptation. Now comes the small-screen turn for one of Gaiman’s first attention-grabbing works, the graphic novel series The Sandman, which debuted in 1989. 

The lavish, 10-episode Netflix version is a good example of Gaiman’s strengths and weaknesses. He’d make a great carny barker, luring us inside a garish tent, then zipping it up with no clear exit out. Or, to over-egg the metaphor more, he’s like a mapmaker who lures you into exciting new terrain, but isn’t completely sure how to get you back home once you’re there. That’s my experience, anyway. Maybe that’s why I’m only halfway through Sandman. Though I’m enjoying it, I don’t feel rushed to reach the finish line. The atmosphere and the immersion are often better than the payoff in Gaiman’s stuff. 

In this convoluted mix of occult mythologies, Tom Sturridge plays Morpheus (aka Dream aka Sandman), one of seven gods known as the Endless. His specialty is giving and controlling the pageants that play out when we plunge into the REM cycle at night. So when he’s imprisoned by a sub-Aleister Crowley occultist (Charles Dance) for a century, a special kind of sleepless hell falls across the globe. While he’s locked away, a young woman named Ethel steals the magical bag of sand, helmet and ruby that give Morpheus his powers.  

The moody, expensive-looking show benefits from speckled appearances by fine actors (Dance, David Thewlis, Joely Richardson, Stephen Fry and, as Satan him/herself, Game of Thrones alum Gwendoline Christie). The show’s weak point is its leading man. Primarily asked to silently glower, Sturridge has a complexion of ivory, a tiny doll’s mouth pursed in disapproval, and a thoroughly punchable face. He’s not the stuff that dreams are made of. 

https://youtu.be/83ClbRPRDXU

For better and worse, since the platform discovered the magical algorithm that gave us 2013’s House of Cards starring two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey (before his grand downfall), Netflix has attracted ever bigger money and names in its original productions. Take the latest, Examples A and B: 

The Gray Man stars Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas (likely to be elevated in September to awards-season phenom with Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde). In this routine, very busy, very loud espionage adventure, they’re directed by Marvel Comic Universe royalty the Russo Brothers, responsible for both one of the early MCU films with the most interesting texture (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and the ginormous franchise payoffs, the Avengers-capping Infinity War and Endgame. 

Then there’s Day Shift, starring Oscar winner Jamie Foxx as a San Fernando valley fellow trying to get back in the graces of his estranged wife and adorable daughter by secretly killing vampires who while away their sunlit hours lurking in seedy hotels and apartments. The most eye-catching elements of Shift are those vampires, played by actor-contortionists (abetted by some CG effects). It’s a little like watching a Cirque du Soleil show with a Goth sensibility and a million explosive blood packs. 

In The Gray Man, the heroically nonplussed Gosling plays codename Sierra Six, a prisoner sprung prematurely from a murder rap by black ops operative Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton). The gray man of the title, Six is recruited for jobs requiring him to take no sides, to stay in the morally gray no-man’s-zone of international skullduggery. His neutrality changes when he’s assigned to kill a fellow Sierra agent, known as Four, who delivers to Six a hard drive containing blackmail intel on their boss, Carmichael (Bridgerton Season 1 heartthrob Regé-Jean Page). 

Crosses and double-crosses follow, with Fitzroy’s ill niece used as human collateral by Carmichael to leverage the man into betraying Six. The Gray Man gives us the usual Netflix-funded pyrotechnics, including a violent fight conducted inside a plummeting cargo plane, eye-friendly global destinations including Prague and a gorgeous, moated chateau, and a lot of explosions and nonstop gunfire.  If you can remember much about it 15 minutes after watching, you’ll have a stronger impression than it made on me.

As for Day Shift, we find Foxx playing vamp hunter Bud Jablonski (yeah, right), whose rule-breaking ways have gotten him banned from the lucrative official union tasked with keeping SoCal cleared of bloodsuckers. But Bud has to get right with his old bosses in order to pay for tuition and braces for his daughter — and presumably more hootchie-mama clothes for his wife Jocelyn. (In that gratuitous role, Meagan Good makes you suspect she herself is a secret member of the undead, since her vacuum-packed clothes seem to give her no room to breathe.) 

From this setup, like The Gray Man, Day Shift is a series of escalating battles where wits or guile are secondary to nonstop gunfire and massive caches of ammo. This reductive and ear-splitting type of moviemaking, now the standard, is as depressing as it is loud. Foxx hasn’t exactly lost his charisma, but he doesn’t give it much of a workout here. This feels like a paycheck movie. The only consistent pleasure of Day Shift comes from Dave Franco as Seth, the finicky, suit-wearing union rep paired with the reluctant Bud. He gives the movie what little comic pulse it has. 

If those two Netflix flicks define high-powered but lazy filmmaking, over on Hulu a new original also promises to be a big disappointment. But it turns out to be halfway decent. Filling the category of “franchise extensions nobody asked for,” Prey gives us an 18th-century prequel to the Predator series. While the idea of the monstrous dreadlocked manhunter from outer space carving his bloody way through a tribe of Native Americans and French trappers in the Great Plains territory sounds stupid, the juxtaposition of science fiction and frontier costume drama provides Prey some memorable imagery. Plus, in this movie, the only significant gunfire comes from a single, old-timey pistol. The deaths are bloody, but they matter here. 

Focused on a clan of Comanches, the movie introduces us to plucky young Naru (Amber Midthunder, one of Prey’s many conscientiously cast Native/First Nation actors). Naru is given that familiar, Disney-style I-wanna-be-taken-seriously-like-the-boys trope. She sneaks into the woods following her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) and his pals when they go off hunting and leave her back at the tipi to help cook the meals. Soon, they themselves are being hunted, and Naru is the first of the tribe (aided by her loyal, smart dog) to figure out there’s more out there than a hungry bear. 

A great movie? Absolutely not. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Amazon Prime’s The Boys), it’s a basic programmer, summoning up the man-vs.-monster/nature power of old myths. But it won’t insult your intelligence nearly as much as so many movies being churned out for streaming platforms. (See above.) 

For another empowered female, say hello to She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, now forcing its way into the crowded stable where Marvel/Disney introduce a new money cow almost every week. Tatiana Maslany (Emmy winner for Orphan Black) stars as lawyer Jennifer Walters, who shares rage issues with her famous cousin. That’s Bruce Banner (the always welcome Mark Ruffalo), who accidentally leaks some of his mutated blood onto Jen during a car wreck. Soon she’s having to learn how to keep her green alter ego out of the courtroom.

Filmed in Atlanta, with Steve Coulter playing a fellow attorney at Jen’s law firm, and Tess Malis Kincaid rumored to turn up eventually as her mom, She-Hulk appears to be another genre wiggle for Marvel, like last year’s initially disorienting but ultimately terrific WandaVision. The first episode’s focus is on broad, CG-enhanced physical comedy as Bruce teaches Jennifer how to control her strength and wardrobe-destroying size shifts (“Spandex is your best friend,” he tells her). There’s not a lot of Marvel-scale battle, save for a wall-busting cameo by The Good Place’s Jameela Jamil as She-Hulk nemesis Titania. Time will tell as new episodes come in, but with its professional-woman, feminist angle, the new show seems to be aiming to be some kind of Ally McBeal on steroids (or gamma rays, anyway). 

NETFLIX | Uncoupled

Here, Harris plays high-end Manhattan realtor Michael, whose partner of 17 years (Tuc Watkins) abruptly later-days him, leaving Michael to pick up the pieces as a middle-aged single gay man in the city’s stylishly shark-infested waters. (He doesn’t even know what the hookup app Grindr is.) 

Creator-producer-writer Star’s onscreen world is an aspirational glossy one, glinting with champagne glasses, priceless shoes, designer labels and peppered with “clever” quips. It gets old fast, for me anyway. I have friends who really liked Uncoupled, and I won’t be breaking up with them over this disagreement. You may like the show just fine. 

In its debut episode, Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon beat its predecessor to become HBO’s biggest series premiere ever, with nearly 10 million viewers tuning in. So it doesn’t really matter whether I liked it or not. But I did (sort of).

Set nearly 200 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen, House focuses on her scheming, silver-haired family long before she turned King’s Landing into a cinder. Paddy Considine stars as a monarch fretting over his lack of male heirs, while former Doctor Who Matt Smith schemes on the sidelines as the brother who’d like to lay claim to that uncomfortable iron throne. 

In addition to offering direct allusions (hello, weirwood tree) and callbacks (a murmured prophecy about the coming of winter), House recalls the first episodes of GoT in other thematic ways. With its flesh-baring visits to a brothel, graphic scenes (unfortunate childbirth, a head-pulping jousting tournament) and long bouts of exposition in darkened rooms, the first episode manages to be both stomach churning and borderline tedious. It’s dynamically directed, though, and lavishly produced. Like many, many others out there, I’ll keep watching. 

I’m also excited to dig into Bad Sisters. The tale of four Irish siblings and the loathsome brother-in-law they want to see dead (Claes Bang of The Square and Netflix’s revisionist Dracula), it’s adapted from a Danish series by Sharon Horgan, who plays one of the sisters. If you watched Amazon Prime’s Catastrophe, the painfully funny series about marriage she co-created with American comic Rob Delaney, you can be sure Bad Sisters is likely to take you smart, funny and original places. Let’s check in later about that one. 

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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 column here.