Sugar review: Colin Farrell channels Marlowe and Spade in a sun-washed neo-noir

Los Angeles, now-ish. One of Hollywood’s most famous producers has a “bum ticker” and a missing granddaughter. Luckily, the best finder in town is on the case, all gruff and wry voiceover narration, late-night whiskey in a glass with no rocks, forever tending a battle-wounded conscience while a mournful sax purrs.

But Colin Farrell’s Sugar is “one of the good guys”—tough, unflappably smart-alecky, yet is made nervous by guns. He grumbles throaty in PI cliches—“I’m not supposed to get this involved,” “I think the lady needs a drink”—and yet appears unable to properly maintain a buzz. He speaks Arabic to a driver, helpfully offering up a doctor connection; he speaks Spanish to his room server, asking about her family; he starts with a handshake, and then offers money, a phone, and a potential restart of a homeless man’s life, seemingly on a whim, fitting in the time around his scheduled binge and hookup. On said hookup, he basically recreates the Curb Your Enthusiasm bit about negotiation and a pre-sex consent tape. Who is this, James Bond after an ayahuasca retreat? Is this all maybe making fun of neo-noir? What exactly is going on?

A whole lot. Much more than the plot, which, well, forget it, it’s Chinatown. But first, Sugar (which premieres April 5 on Apple TV+) opens in Tokyo, in black-and-white, rife with labored style: hazy washes, close-ups, steadicams, fisheyes, an effortful aesthetic not to be gleaned from the trailer. Farrell looks fresh and hungry for a small-screen redo of True Detective season two: Calvin Klein ad classic, Savile Row suit, clean cut, and possibly reverse aging. He’s even apologetic for the pain he’s caused. “I don’t like hurting people, it’s true.” He kicks ass, he catches a fly with chopsticks, he savors hard and deep the taste of the top-shelf stuff, neat. But he seems most piqued by being able to get home, to sunny L.A., to his back issues of Sight And Sound and American Cinematographer.

“This is a tough business, but steady.” And which business is that? Sugar seems to enjoy seeing himself enmeshed in the industry of Hollywood. He rebuffs being called a buff, instead considering it “more like an addiction.” Throughout, fragmentary flashbacks are relentless, unapologetic, and quite cool. We see endless cuts of Bogart, clips of The Big Heat, Double Indemnity, The Third Man. He late-night screens Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz. He talks about The Thing like an effusive hipster film undergrad after two Manhattans. And we’re along for the ride to see him aping his big-screen dreams, daydreaming through the thickets of investigator life, really playing at playing a lone wolf snoop. Though he’s actually very good—and looks even better, framed by palm trees and sunny washes and a jazzy, jivey rhythm hard to turn down or away from. The simple slam of a classic car’s door, the walk up to a house in the Hills, the neon of an old bar, the camera always lingering one loving beat too long — against it all he easily conjures a less rumpled Elliott Gould, a less swaggery Gene Hackman, most any good tough from any Raymond Chandler.

Movies are his entree, his motivation, it seems, taking him deeper into the transgressions of the powerful Siegel family tree. Jonathan (James Cromwell), searching for his promising twentysomething granddaughter, Olivia, brings him aboard. The aging but irrepressible familial patriarch has the bearded gravity of a George Lucas. Amy Ryan plays the addled and searching mother, a fading rock star sometimes backsliding toward Sunset Boulevard starlet-dom. Sugar’s boss, or handler, Ruby (Kirby), doesn’t like the job for him, of course, echoing the concerns of a secretive social circle of well-dressed nerds he finds himself mysteriously, reluctantly party to. Meanwhile, Nate Corddry, flat and boyish, as the petulant nepo-baby dickhead Davey, won’t stop causing trouble. There is lying, secrets, cheating, hidden motives, more lying, inside-baseball industry mechanics, sexual blackmail, and the echoes of casting couch disclosures, all clashing against Sugar’s suavity and cool. It all gets ugly, if predictable—until it’s not. (The season’s second half, impossible to discuss in any way without spoilers, may very well have come from a different writer’s room, or a different world.) But even before that, it is indeed hard to keep a straight face when regarding Stallings (Eric Lange), cartoonish as a caricatured bald badass, smashing his cohort’s head, a sex trafficker seemingly high on a recent study of J.K. Simmons in Whiplash.

Somehow it all mostly holds though, at least for a good while, everything orbiting just so around Farrell’s undeniable charisma. Even when he doesn’t have much to do but drive and brow-furrow, he vacillates smoothly between smart-ass sleuth and puppy-dog maverick. Vulnerable, sorrowful, but with “good hair,” he is beleaguered by waves of anxiety and an undefined disorientation. Increasingly, he is haunted by old social-media posts of Olivia, by a hazy past, by reminders to “be careful.” Tellingly, his voiceover whisper, all back booth-hushed and couple-of-scotches sexy, is the show’s most alluring element.

“Sometimes where someone’s been is the best way to find where they’ve gone,” he flat lines in his search for Olivia and for a sense of self-vindication. Though on reflection, the quip could not apply less to Farrell as an actor. Everything he does seems to make the tabloid image of an impossibly handsome bad boy feel like a lifetime ago. Here, though the project maybe doesn’t completely land, he at least makes an interesting effort in applying to the school of Marlowe and Spade, offering loving referential glimpses to the likes of The Long Goodbye and neo-noir takes like Memento. The show bobs, weaves, and eventually turns, establishing itself as something quite like one of Farrell’s finest performances, In Bruges, and also as something, as contrived as the notion may seem, like Los Angeles itself. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Sugar premieres April 5 on Apple TV+