Apple+ has been gathering momentum in the streaming wars, and Dope Thief could end up as the crown jewel of the platform. It’s an engrossing crime thriller with great performances, excellent pacing, and plot threads full of potential.
Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura play Ray and Manny, two friends and stickup men who rob drug-dealers while posing as DEA agents. The show makes it quickly apparent that they are not seasoned criminals, tough guys. or even all that smart. Just two guys with checkered pasts trying to make money within a moral gray area.
It’s a compelling premise that is elevated by the chemistry between Henry and Moura. From the first sequence, you can tell that they’re close and know a lot about each other. Again, the show doesn’t portray them as experienced criminals, so their demeanor is never cold, even in scenes where they’re robbing dealers. Their dynamic helps ground the entire show in reality.
While there are only three episodes out so far, the writers have done a great job of packing extensive drama and action in each one. The first episode has a job that will obviously go wrong and turn into an absolute disaster. They hit a meth lab and when everything goes awry, they leave multiple corpses in their wake and walk away with a much bigger score than they expected.
It’s obvious that they just entered a web for which they are too small and are caught in the middle of something much bigger involving a biker gang and real DEA agents. Dope Thief does a great job of presenting danger to Ray and Manny. They get hit during shootouts; they are outsmarted and desperately try to stay one small step ahead of the people hunting them. It lets the audience know that anything can go wrong at any time and not even the main characters are safe in this story.
While the show has been stellar thus far, there is one problem. While Ray’s character is slowly fleshed out through flashbacks and conversations about his past, Manny’s character is not nearly as developed. Promotional materials frame Ray and Manny as the core duo and Wagner Moura is fantastic in all of his scenes, so it’s a shame that his backstory has been left as a mystery thus far.
Hopefully, that changes later in the season, but besides that, it’s hard to think of any significant flaws in the show. Dope Thief is a standout crime show that I would easily recommend to people who enjoyed Breaking Bad or The Wire, and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the season unfolds.
Author Bio:
Ulises Duenas is a senior writer and film critic at Highbrow Magazine.
For Highbrow Magazine