Apple TV+ – series “Dope Thief”: Violence creates counter -violence

I just wanted to have a normal life! », Manny (Wagner Moura) desperately cries out his buddy Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and pulls the safety pen of a hand grenade. Ray takes the thing away from him and throws it into a dumpster, which then flies into the air. But the life of the two main characters in the Apple TV+series “Dope Thief” is not normal anyway.

The series debut by Peter Craig, most recently responsible for directing and script in expensive Hollywood blockbusters such as “Batman”, “Top Gun Maverick” or “Gladiator 2”, is much more than just a thriller. Once again, a Hollywood mainstream size seems to be artistic in series format at Apple, similar to Ben Stiller with “Severance”. Directed by the first episode of “Dope Thief” led co-producer Ridley Scott. The disturbing social-realistic eight divider implemented the novel of the same name by Dennis Tafoya as a rapidly told thriller in the urban periphery of a crazy and corrupt America. “Dope Thief” tells of two friends of petty criminals who get to know each other in the juvenile jail and, older, spend the elderly as drug investigators, attacking small dealers and decreasing cracks, meth or heroin and money.

It is about the structural violence in the life of the two men, who are becoming more and more desperate after the big coup, which is an unsuccessful raid.

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The series is located in the dilapidated workers’ quarters of Philadelphias. The eastern coastal city has been a drug hotspot for years, nowhere in the USA is there as much and as cheap heroin as in Philadelphia, where the streets of some districts of drug addicts are lined.

Manny and Ray’s stitch is to perform with played police authority, intimidate their victims and quickly disappear with the prey, if possible without violence. It all works well until one day you get a supposedly hot tip and attack a meth laboratory outside the city. But several people are shot. In addition, the two small crooks captured almost half a million dollars and large amounts of drugs. From then on, a drug cartel sits on your neck, which sends a rocker gang armed up to your teeth and also threatens your families. In addition, as it turns out, real federal agents of the drug investigation undercover were in the meth laboratory. One is shot, a second official, Kristy Lynne (Marin Ireland), survived seriously injured.

Were Ray and Manny used to trigger a war between cartels, in which breakdown federal police officers may also be involved? The two men will soon be hunted and do not seem to have the slightest chance of getting out of history unscathed. “Dope Thief” is a little reminiscent, also with regard to the aesthetics of the dilapidated urban area, of the legendary series “The Wire” located in Baltimore, but in contrast to this is not a cop history.

Rather, the eight divider traces the biographies of the petty criminals Ray and Manny. It is about the structural violence in the life of the two men, who, after the big coup, which is a failed raid for them, are becoming more and more desperate and can hardly keep their fear in check. Ray is also repeatedly haunted by memories of his childhood love, which fell victim to a violent crime. In this way, “Dope Thief” radically radically the common myth of the Narco, the drug dealer, as a pop -cultural hero figure, as is designed today in films and series. But this star-occupied series is not only about drugs, but rather about the very banal everyday life of people in the socially precarious America.

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Again and again it is also about racist police violence, which has an inglorious and long history in Philadelphia, where Mumia Abu Jamal was arrested. A huge mural with the portrait of the former police chief and later mayor Frank Rizzo, a reactionary law-and-order hardliner from the 80s, a postcard motif of the city was painted over a few years ago in the course of the Black-Lives-Matter movement.

As Ray learns from his father as a child to put the beating of the police in silence to survive “to be a real man”, it really hurts. The escalation potential of this sometimes very violent and bloody staged story does not seem to end at all and comes up with some astonishing dramaturgical twists and a furious finale.

Available on Apple TV+