The first season of Netflix’ German thriller Crooks spread the action around Europe; the second season expands its footprint all the way to Thailand. But with things that spread out, will the show be as fun as it was in its first season?
CROOKS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “TIBLISI”, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The Gist: Nina Oblomow (Maya Unger) is being driven by Joseph (Christoph Krutzler) to a rendezvous with an organized crime leader named Arkadij Igorevich Zakejew (Mark Ivanir). The idea is that, in a transaction where she is supposed to give him a rare ruble coin the has in her possession, she’s going to shoot and kill him. However, plans change when Arkadij finds out that the Georgian police are close. By the end of the night, Arkadij has indeed been shot, but Joseph ends up in possession of the coin.
Two years later, we see Charly (Frederick Lau) in Berlin with his now ex-wife Samira (Svenja Jung) and son Jonas (Jonathan Titte). Jonas called on him to use his locksmith and safecracking skills to get them inside their house due to being locked out. Because of the issues Charly ran across the last time he partnered with Joseph, Samira finds that the less he’s around, the better, but it’s something Jonas doesn’t agree with. He decides to take a gun with him on the trip to Austria with the family of Samira’s new boyfriend.
As he exits Samira’s house, Charly gets snagged by the police. A detective named Henning (Jan Georg Schütte) wants to know where the rare coin that Charly and Joseph searched for a few years prior is, because if he doesn’t get it, Charly will be thrown in prison.
Through channels, Charly gets in touch with Joseph, and is surprised to see that Joseph is now in Bangkok. Since the incident with Nina, Joseph has been keeping the coin with him, hanging around his neck at all times.
Charly is working as a cook in a restaurant owned by Hannes (Thomas Miraz) and Mückerl (Florian Carove), the latter of which is in trouble with a local thug named Kees (Raymond Thiry) over gambling debts. When Charly arrives in Bangkok and goes to the restaurant, he sees the aftermath of a “little brawl” between Kees’ men and the restaurants’ owners, which Joseph participated in. But the biggest problem is that the coin is gone.
Back in Austria, Rio (Lukas Watzl) wants to propose to his girlfriend, but when he goes to buy the ring, his credit card is denied. His monthly stipend from crime boss Weidinger (Martin Zauner) has been cut off, because Weidinger wants proof that a nemesis is dead, like Rio has indicated.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Crooks reminds us a bit of Lupin, only with two leads instead of one.
Our Take: As with the first season, Crooks is a pretty generic crime thriller that boasts good chemistry between its leads, Lau and Krutzler, and some unexpected action scenes. The second season is even more spread out than the first, with a lot of the action taking place in either Thailand or Austria. But the more scattered the characters, the more scattered the story.
Character development isn’t front in center in this show, written by Benjamin Hessler, Georg Lippert and Marvin Kren. Charly is forever in “one last job and I’m done” mode, and Joseph likes to get drunk and help make schnitzel at the restaurant where he works. It’s always fun to watch him beat the crap out of thugs, given his relative size and lack of conditioning. It’s fun to watch these two guys fumble their way through a heist or a search and somehow get over people like Kees, who are supposed to be more calculating.
But the rest of the stories are shrug-inducing. For instance, with Samira and Jonas, the only purpose they serve at this point is collateral that spurs Charly into action cracking safes, something that he has vowed he doesn’t want to do anymore. We’re not even sure where Rio’s story is going, and how it might intersect with what Charly and Joseph are doing in Thailand.
Performance Worth Watching: Christoph Krutzler is a very unlikely action star, but Joseph really knows what he’s doing when he or people he’s defending are under threat.
Sex And Skin: Kees owns a strip club called The Black Pagoda, but even there, the dancers are wearing lingerie.
Parting Shot: During what looks like a performance of “Swan Lake,” we see a perfectly healthy Arkadij in the audience.
Sleeper Star: Speaking of Arkadij, Mark Evanir has always been good as a menacing thug or crime boss, so it’ll be fun to see him here.
Most Pilot-y Line: When we encounter Joseph in Thailand, he doing a shot-for-shot challenge with some random dude in a bar. That only seems to happen in moves or TV, doesn’t it? Have you ever seen or participated in a shot-for-shot challenge?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Crooks is mostly a fun show, despite its relatively thin plot and cliched crime-drama characters, mostly because of the unlikely pairing of its lead characters.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.