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Colin Farrell’s ‘Sugar’ Is a Clumsy, Cliché L.A. Noir With a Baffling Twist: TV Review
Colin Farrell stars as the namesake private investigator in a hackneyed LA noir with a baffling twist.
& Mrs. Smith,” “Dark Phoenix”) and directed by Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener,” “The Two Popes”), doesn’t reveal its true nature until far too late in the game — at which point a clumsy twist introduces an entirely new premise with little in the way of legible buildup or coherent follow-through. Olivia’s father Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris) brushes off her absence as a presumed relapse into past struggles with addiction; Sugar’s associate Ruby (Kirby, who has dropped Howell-Baptiste from her professional name) cautions him against taking the case — ostensibly because he’s overworked, though there’s clearly some ulterior motive at play. Bernie’s ex-wife Melanie (Amy Ryan), a lapsed rock star and mother figure to Olivia, owns the show’s obligatory source of mid-century modern real estate porn, a prerequisite of any Southland-set crime yarn; Olivia’s half-brother David (Nate Corddry), an aging child actor, anchors a deeply silly storyline with his mother Margit (Anna Gunn), which treats us to Skyler White fulminating about “this town.” But as a whole, this overqualified cast performs far below their established abilities, weighed down by material too broad and self-serious to allow for an inspired turn like Ryan’s cello-playing villainess from “Only Murders in the Building,” a more successful deconstruction of our crime-obsessed culture.
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