Not every comic adaptation needs a cape, a multiverse or a beam of light shooting into the sky. Prime Video has released the first teaser for Criminal, its long-gestating version of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s noir series, and the most outlandish superpower on offer is a man who can plan a robbery three moves ahead.
That man is Leo Patterson, played by Charlie Hunnam: a brilliant thief whose jobs involve no guns and no violence, which is why every other crook in the city thinks he’s a coward. Gus Halper plays his childhood friend Ricky Lawless, son of the feared outlaw Teeg Lawless, and Luke Evans is Ricky’s older brother Tracy, who chose the Army over prison twenty years ago and hasn’t been back since. Emilia Clarke is Mallory, a robber in Ricky’s heist crew who also happens to be his lover, and Adria Arjona plays Greta, a first-rate thief and single mother trying to get out of the life. Richard Jenkins, John Hawkes and a supporting cast long enough to need its own getaway driver fill out the rest.
The release plan is tidier than most of the jobs in the comics. The eight-episode season comes in two halves of four. Part One: Coward lands on 13 January 2027, with Leo and Ricky haunted by a murder from their childhood and a heist that goes wrong. Part Two: Lawless follows on 27 January, as Tracy is dragged back to the life he fled because Ricky has got in too deep with the wrong people. Both titles come straight from the first two collected volumes, so readers already know roughly how much trouble everyone is in. The answer is: all of it.
The creators’ fingerprints are all over the crime scene, which is encouraging. Brubaker is co-showrunner with crime novelist Jordan Harper, Phillips is an executive producer and, according to Brubaker, drew a great deal of art for the show, and Dee Rees is behind the camera. Prime Video’s own tagline for the teaser is “All you have to do is aim, breathe, and squeeze”, which is either sound advice on marksmanship or the shortest self-help book ever written.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’re more usually found reviewing paperbacks with spaceships on the cover, but Criminal has earned its place as one of the best comics of the century so far. It has been running in one form or another since 2006, it has a shelf of Eisners to show for it, and Phillips’s art has the rare knack of making a 21st-century comic feel like a lost 1970s paperback you found in a motorway services. If the series catches even half of those shadows, Prime Video will have something better than another superhero show. If it doesn’t, Leo would at least have the sense to walk away before the shooting starts.
If the embed above stops working, the teaser is on YouTube here: Criminal official teaser (Prime Video).
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