I really had no interest in watching Dope Thief. It’s another of those crime dramas set in a bleak-looking city – possibly there are some pretty parts of Philadelphia but we only get to see the bad bits – where everyone seems to be on welfare or a drug dealer, or both, everything looks washed out, grimy and grey, and where you could die horribly any second. And I get quite enough of all this on my increasingly rare trips to London.
But I was desperate. I’ve finished the second season of Severance (very good; definitely worth the effort); White Lotus will only see you through one night a week; season three of Reacher is so dismal it doesn’t even qualify as ‘so bad it’s good’. So I needed something else and the online reviews for Dope Thief looked decent.
Directed (at least the first episode is) by executive producer Ridley Scott, Dope Thief is definitely a cut above your usual inner-city depression porn. The pacing is snappy so that you’re drawn straight in, the tension is relentlessly high, the dialogue sharp and funny and the storytelling economical: when a character’s past needs illuminating, you’re treated to very rapid, almost subliminal, black and white flashbacks, so no time is wasted developing hinterland.
Our lovably feckless protagonists are ne’er-do-wells and lifelong friends Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who scrape a living by dressing up as drug enforcement agents and raiding small-time local drug dealers, relieving them of their drugs and petty cash. All is ticking along nicely until a friend, newly released from prison, suggests they raise their aims a little higher and try to make some more serious money.
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