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8 hours ago
5
Contrary to popular belief, a man’s reach should ideally not exceed his grasp. All hell tends to break loose if it does. Never more so, it turns out, than if a pair of low-level criminals find a semi-lucrative groove posing as DEA agents to fake-bust other small-time drug dealers and relieve them of their cash without real police ever getting involved.
Such is the hustle of Ray Driscoll (Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny Carvalho (Narcos’ Wagner Moura): best friends since they met as young men in prison, addicts at different stages of recovery, and now partners in crime moving through the minor crack dens of Philadelphia. The opening set piece is so funny (“Did you just pause the game?” Ray asks incredulously as the armed pair burst into a dealer’s house screaming at the computer-playing addicts to get down on the floor) that for a while the vibe is very much “What if Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s ‘Pontiac Bandit’ Doug Judy took things up a notch from stealing cars?”, with a light dusting of Pulp Fiction as the duo riff before, during and after the action on the power of an authoritative voice, Manny’s relationship, and the necessity of researching a job.
There are also shades of Breaking Bad and, as the series expands to take in more characters from both sides of the law, and more of the problems and pressures experienced by people from various social and economic demographics, it gestures to The Wire too. Though Dope Thief never pretends to have that show’s ambition to stand as a state-of-the-nation piece, it is written by Peter Craig, who worked on The Batman and Top Gun: Maverick, the first episode is directed by Ridley Scott, and there is never a moment when you don’t feel like you are in supremely capable hands.
When Manny’s girlfriend Sherry moves in and Ray discovers that Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), the woman who raised him, is in need of money for (he believes) medical bills, Manny and Ray act on a tip that, although it will take them out of the neighbourhood and their comfort zone, should net them a bigger score. It does, but at the cost of five dead and one near-dead undercover DEA agent, Mina (Marin Ireland), plus the destruction of a key piece of the eastern seaboard’s main drug-running corridor. Its owner would like the money and the meth Ray and Manny stole returned to him, along, ideally, with their heads. The DEA feels similarly strongly.
From there we launch into a mesmerising if increasingly preposterous game of cat-and-mouse involving our anti-heroes and the gravel-voiced man on the other end of the phone. His people pursue them ever more closely, while the police investigation cranks into gear.
As the men’s desperation increases and the violence ramps up (“This is not us!” cries Manny after the scale of their mistake becomes clear, “We took candy from babies! We’re not real cops, they weren’t real dealers! Nothing in our lives has ever been real. Until now”), Dope Thief would risk becoming cartoonish were it not for the lovingly detailed portraits that emerge of Manny and especially Ray, along with their backstories in monochromatic flashbacks.
Ray discovers that it is not medical bills his beloved “Ma” needs to pay, but lawyer’s fees to try and get her old boyfriend, Ray’s abusive father Bart (Ving Rhames), out of prison on compassionate grounds now that he has terminal cancer. Ray tells his AA group his father used to lock him in a closet so he could get high, and when Ray visits Bart in prison he remembers the man beating his mother and telling the child to hit her too. “I still live like a stray dog,” Ray tells Bart, and a lifetime of inexplicably bad choices – and maybe those still to come – suddenly become all too clearly comprehensible.
There are holes in the plot – the main one being why, whatever ties you have to your city by way of maternal figures, girlfriends and carefully curated vinyl collections, would you not when faced with the prospect of torture or death at the hands of ruthless traffickers swiftly remove yourself from the vicinity. But things move so fast and furiously that Dope Thief gets away with it. It is essentially a heist story, a caper, and you have to stretch your credulity for those anyway, so what’s a little more? Especially when you get a performance like Henry’s thrown in. He ranges from comedy to tragedy in a single scene and never misses a beat. He is extraordinary and the rest of the cast are up there with him. He gives Dope Thief heart and at times threatens to break the viewer’s. Wonderful.
