Colin Farrell’s ‘Sugar’ Has a Disastrous Bombshell Twist
Sugar is, initially, an ideal marriage of star and material, casting Colin Farrell as a private investigator wrapped up in a byzantine Los Angeles mystery involving a missing girl, corrupt Hollywood cretins, and shadowy operators on both sides of the good-bad divide. It’s Raymond Chandler in a post-Harvey Weinstein world of casting couch abuses and sexual blackmail, and Farrell cuts a perfect figure as a noble and sorrowful gumshoe who’s haunted by his past and boasts a deep, abiding love of the movies, such that his every expression, gesture, and interior thought proves a self-conscious homage.
Whether deliberately or instinctively echoing his cinematic ancestors, Farrell’s sleuth is a throwback with his own charismatic brand of cool, and he does much to keep showrunner Mark Protosevich’s eight-part Apple TV+ neo-noir humming—at least, that is, until a twist disastrously upends this serpentine saga, rendering it little more than a gimmicky pantomime.
It’s impossible to fully discuss that development without spoiling Sugar, premiering April 5, but there’s also no way to adequately judge this streaming effort without underscoring how drastically and deleteriously its big shocker impacts everything. From the get-go, there are hints that Protosevich’s tale is hiding an enormous secret that pertains to its protagonist John Sugar (Farrell) and the covert organization of which he’s a (somewhat reluctant) member, not least of which are a few subtle foreshadowing comments. Nonetheless, no amount of early suspicions can mitigate the blow of the eventual bombshell, which is at once ill-fitting, silly, illogical, and unnecessary—a rare misstep superfecta that sullies, in hindsight, the preceding action. In other words, regardless of how enticing Sugar seems at outset, prepare for inevitable disappointment.