Review by C.J. Bunce
It was 28 years ago the quirky crime comedy Fargo stopped audiences in their tracks with its preposterous story of murder in a northern town punctuated with a quirky accent. Its success can be tied to a constellation of reasons, from a script and direction by the Coen brothers to a working actress ready to make her mark. Sometimes risks on the odd projects work. Executive producers Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum come really close with Brian Donovan and Ed Herro’s limited series The Sticky, now streaming on Prime Video. It’s four half-hour episodes of heist movie and thespian brilliance, followed by two episodes that drive off the cliff–good drama and acting that needed someone to step in and say, “this is a two-hour movie or a one-season show–it doesn’t need to be anything else.”
Like legions of movies based on actual events (It Could Happen to You, as an example that somehow feels in the same realm), the story’s actual event is a Quebec heist of maple syrup that ended up with some men in jail. Like Fargo, circumstances go sideways when small-time criminal activity goes big time and murder enters the picture. Margo Martindale (Mrs. Davis, The Riches, The Firm, Orphan) is Ruth Landry, a maple syrup farmer hamstrung by the vile leader of the local maple syrup co-op, Léonard Gauthier, played by Guy Nadon. Her husband is in a coma, and Gauthier uses a technicality to undercut her business, forcing her to sell at ever-declining offers.
Just as Ruth hits the limit of her self-control, a local security guard is concocting a plan to make some big money. French-Canadian actor Guillaume Cyr plays Remy Bouchard, who figured out there’s nothing to prevent someone from taking advantage of the loose security at the syrup warehouse where he works and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in maple syrup without anyone ever knowing it was gone. When Remy hears a slick-dressed man in a restaurant bathroom stall describing activities with the mob he works for back in Boston, he pitches the heist.
The Boston mobster in town is Mike Byrne, played by Chris Diamantopoulos (Mrs. Davis, Red Notice, Beavis and Butt-Head), who has years of loyalty to Ruth’s sick husband. He talks Ruth into participating in the robbery with him and Remy, but they don’t know he has impulse control issues, which result in his whacking Remy’s co-worker in advance so there are no loose threads. Even worse, he’s not that much of a mobster, actually a low-level plant waterer (literally) who botched his first real score back in Boston.
Four tightly written scripts with a small writers’ room lay it all out with only the three leads like a smart suspense thriller. It’s Fargo but better. The color comes from the same variety of myriad regional accents that make the Scotland series Shetland so culturally interesting. The evil Gauthier’s dialect is so truncated it pops like Frances McDormand in Fargo (that French-Canadian speech sometimes reverberates from a Wisconsin-to-Minnesota-to-Dakotas twang). The casting of Cyr as Remy was smart, too–although Ruth and Mike are very rapid-fire American in their banter and angst, Remy’s leading young man looks, coupled with a kid-like tooth gap and a French accent that somehow sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, make for an endearing and unique criminal co-lead. Martindale brings her loud-mouth low-class gripes she’s done before in roles like in The Riches together with Diamantopoulos’s wildly-energetic character like his co-lead in Mrs. Davis, and some real magic happens. If it were edited down to a two-hour movie with a satisfying ending, this The Sticky could have been a major hit.
Besides the small town claustrophobia and all those trees to tap, and that warehouse, the local flare and sparks come from several well-placed American pop song staples in their French-translated editions, like Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Heart’s These Dreams, Sonny and Cher’s I Got You, Babe, and Lollipop by The Chordettes. Each arrives vaguely familiar until the song sinks in.
But then the fifth episode arrives. Jamie Lee Curtis steps in as a loud, foul-mouthed, slightly higher level mobster than Mike, in town from the Boston crime family to clean house. Mike is not supposed to be doing side hustles but following orders and being a “good boy.” The series was doing fine, and could have spent more time building up suspense with dueling law enforcement, played by Suzanne Clément and Gita Miller. Normally a cameo by Curtis would be a good thing. But it didn’t need an A-lister pulling viewers out of the story. So the fifth episode is sidetracked, leaving a quick final half hour to pull off the heist. The result is a less than satisfying pay-off, no satisfactory comeuppance for the series villain, and worse, it’s all twisted to leave a second season opening available to continue… something… from this story. Just as what should have applied to the series Prison Break, no heist plot should last beyond a movie or single season of TV.
It’s a rare series that has the right number of minutes to match the worth of the story. Any other series would have padded this to ten episodes. But maybe some kind of focus group, outside filmmaker input, or anything else could have helped make this fulfill the promise of the first two hours. It’s still a fun watch with relatively little time commitment. Martindale, Cry, and Diamantopoulus are excellent in these roles. At times the story is on par with last year’s hit The Gentlemen and as good as some elements of the heist classic The Bank Job–with so much less production cost and effort. Great writing and editing almost won the day.
All six first-season episodes of The Sticky are now streaming on Prime Video.
And if you really want the immersive experience, pick up my favorite cookies from my time in Canada: Dare Maple Cookies. Mmm… good. They’re available here at Amazon.
