Smoke review: Like a Mahesh Bhatt thriller with an Apple-level budget and an MX Player vibe

And that’s because the twist undermines everything we’d seen in the two-odd hours preceding it. Smoke is a slovenly paced, cliche-ridden mess that doesn’t know if it wants to be a goofy send-up of TV crime dramas or if it wants to be something more serious; something that meets the high benchmark that Lehane has set for himself with stories such as Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It ends up being neither, falling in the Zero Day zone of streaming TV that has no idea how ridiculous it all is. Just because the show has the glossy sheen of an expensive Apple production doesn’t mean that it isn’t a mid-2000s network drama in disguise.

Egerton plays the arson expert with typical flair. He’s quite a nice choice for the part, which isn’t as straightforward as you’re initially led to believe. Gudsen has an almost romantic view of fire; he’s so consumed by it that he has decided to write a book based on his experiences. We catch him narrating it on his device in his moments of solitude. He seems to be really pleased with how it’s coming along, and also deeply embarrassed to talk about it with Calderon, who’s shown to be tough as nails. It’s a rather on-the-nose subversion of gender roles, until the twist rolls around.

The thing with a show like Smoke is that, once the twist is revealed, there is no reason to continue watching it. Unless, of course, you enjoy looking at semi-intelligent characters run around in circles. To make up for the lack of dramatic stakes, the show sends them on a wild goose chase on occasion. Then, it introduces a new character altogether. His name is Freddy, and he works as a line cook at a fast food restaurant. Freddy is the kind of person who has spent his entire life blending into the furniture, until a chatty customer empowers him to step out of his shell and seize the day.

Smoke attempts to investigate how monsters are created. Are they born, or are they a product of their environment? Are they introverts or extroverts. Egerton and Smollett do the best with the material they’ve been given, but even they have no idea if they’re supposed to play their characters as in on the joke, or dead serious.

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It’s as if portions of the script were withheld from them. There is a dissonance in the show’s tone that spills over onto their characters, and, consequently, their performances. When Black Bird was released in 2022, there was a sense that Apple was onto something, delivering one all-timer after another. It was the greatest streak that a ‘network’ had been on since AMC in the late 2000s, or HBO a decade before that. But as the streamer embraces the Netflix model, it must also prepare itself for criticism that it had previously avoided.

Smoke
Creator – Dennis Lehane
Cast – Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Rafe Spall, Greg Kinnear
Rating – 2/5