Black Rabbit: slick crime thriller set in a high-end New York restaurant

Netflix has been searching for a new “dark crime drama” since “Ozark” concluded in 2022, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. And with the “glossy” thriller “Black Rabbit”, it feels like it has finally struck gold.

Jude Law stars as Jake Friedken, a “slick operator” whose fashionable restaurant-cum-nightclub Black Rabbit has made him the toast of Manhattan society. When his dishevelled, gambling addict brother Vince (Jason Bateman) comes back into his life, Jake’s first instinct might have been to cast him adrift; but they share a complicated past (including a stint in a band) that binds them – and so instead, he offers him a job.

Their fraternal bond is severely challenged, however, when a gangster turns up, demanding that Vince repay his huge gambling debts, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Successful as Jake’s restaurant appears to be, he can’t stump up that much cash, so the pair resort to ever-more high-stakes schemes in an effort to find it.

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We know how all this sort of thing goes, and “the law of diminishing returns for the viewer sets in pretty quickly”. To make it worse, the brothers are so “unlovely”, it is hard to care about either of them; many of the supporting characters “are little more than ciphers”; and the whole thing is decidedly cheerless.

The series ratchets up the stress levels, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times; it ably conveys its sleazy nightclub milieu, and along with the splashy violence, it has an intriguing strain of melancholy about squandered potential. But it never quite adds up to the sum of its parts.