The Sexy Beast TV Series Is a Tedious Prequel That Doesn’t Need to Exist

While plenty of excellent prequels have graced the big and small screen over the years, this narrative setup almost always faces an uphill battle. Since we generally know where the story will end up, generating and maintaining audience interest can be difficult, especially in genres that rely on twists and turns. Many of the best examples use dramatic irony to get around their predictability, utilizing tragic inevitability as a strength, but making this land in a way that doesn’t nullify the narrative can be tricky. Another hurdle is these stories need to seamlessly tie in with what comes after while avoiding over-explaining every little detail. And most of all, they need to find some new angle or raison d’être so they don’t feel like a cheap cash grab meant to exploit nostalgia.

Unfortunately, the Paramount+ TV series Sexy Beast, a prequel to the 2000 Jonathan Glazer crime drama of the same name, fails to accomplish any of these things. Despite being spawned from a lean, 85-minute thriller, it stretches out each incidental line of dialogue and subtle allusion into an 8-episode slog that still somehow doesn’t cleanly bridge to where the film picks up. Instead of finding its own identity or successfully building out these characters’ backstories, it comes across as a far lesser imitation of its idiosyncratic source material. Perhaps too accurately to its protagonist’s feelings, I was desperate to escape this show’s dreary British backdrop so I could once again be under the movie’s scorching Iberian sun.

For those who haven’t seen the original, Sexy Beast is a sweaty, weirdo, sort-of heist flick about a retired British thief named Gal (Ray Winstone) who enjoys sunbathing in the Spanish countryside alongside his loving wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman). However, one day, his idyllic paradise is broken up when a “friend” from his previous life, Don (Ben Kingsley), arrives and demands that he take up one last job. It’s like a high school reunion where instead of awkwardly interacting with an ex, you have to contend with an unhinged sociopath who wants to do you and your loved ones harm. Among the film’s many memorable aspects, Kingsley’s performance as Don is an absolute tour de force that won him the Oscar that year, his every line inspiring dread and the threat of impending violence. It’s a riveting exclamation mark of a movie that doesn’t particularly invite elaboration.

Unfortunately, whether we want it or not, that elaboration is here in the form of a TV prequel. Following Gal (now played by James McArdle) and Don (Emun Elliott) when they were partners in the ‘90s, we watch as the two build a reputation in the British criminal underworld. Almost all the characters from the original are here, including Teddy Bass (Stephen Moyer), who the pair work under as they try to pull off a seemingly impossible job. Meanwhile, Gal begins a courtship with his future wife, DeeDee (Sarah Greene), despite the fact that he’s already engaged to his high school sweetheart.

The series’ first and most obvious problem is that it never breaks out of its predecessor’s shadow. It charmlessly mines the movie’s memorable lines, shots, and visual motifs, coming up short next to Glazer’s experimental direction. Memorable, off-the-cuff moments that passed by in a fit of delirium in the original are needlessly expounded on here. For some reason, do you want to know why Don says “Preparation, preparation, preparation” that one time? Well, this prequel has the answers for you.

Beyond this, it also fails to meaningfully build on the film’s core characters. Going into this show, Don was undoubtedly the most difficult detail to pin down. Kingsley’s volatile performance in the original is borderline impossible to replicate, and it’s a classic example of an antagonist who benefits from a relatively small amount of screen time because it creates far more tension when he finally does appear. By contrast, here Don is in every single episode, and almost all the menace around him dissipates as this rendition attempts to paint him in a much more sympathetic light. There’s nothing wrong with Emun Elliott’s performance, but he was given a relatively impossible task of living up to Kingsley’s uncomfortable curse-laden tirades. It also doesn’t help that the direction they take the character in comes across more like a superficial trick meant to generate pity than a genuine attempt at empathy, and broadly doesn’t square with the sinister presence we see later.

As for our other lead, Gal, James McArdle captures the affability of his character but none of the sleazeball charm, which, again, is more on showrunner and writer Michael Caleo than the performer. Gal’s arc, where he struggles to decide if he wants to stick around in his hometown with his fiancé, suffers significantly from the classic prequel problem of knowing where things will end up, causing his familial drama to largely fall flat. As a result, this entire conflict feels like dragged-out drudgery. The one saving grace here is that DeeDee (Sarah Greene) feels like much more of a complete character compared to her previous presentation, adding at least some point of improvement.

Of course, a fair share of people will probably approach this show without existing knowledge of the movie. Although it’s a somewhat well-known picture among cinephiles, particularly because it was Glazer’s freshman film, it wasn’t exactly a box-office smash. Unfortunately, even judged as a self-contained story, the narrative is so bogged down by excruciating pacing and a blasé tone that it doesn’t succeed as a standalone work.

While it’s easy to imagine this tale functioning as either a captivating crime drama or a breezy caper, it doesn’t commit to either direction, awkwardly waffling between the two with mixed success. Its sharp punctuations of violence feel juvenile instead of earned, and the extended cast come across as paper-thin villains instead of the kind of nuanced, dangerous figures we see in the best-portrayed criminal underworlds. In particular, every storytelling decision around Teddy Bass is entirely head-scratching and punctuates a general inability to build up compelling bad guys.

And although this series is theoretically about Don and Gal carrying out heists, we witness a vanishingly small amount of caper antics (admittedly, this is true in the original as well, but that’s sort of the point given the movie’s premise). There are some satisfying moments where Gal comes up with ingenious solutions to seemingly impossible problems, but these segments are vastly overshadowed in runtime by the shallow relationship drama that dominates the plot.

Sexy Beast falls into the exact prequel problems you would expect, and its only real surprise is how strange it is that this television program based on a relatively under-watched flick from more than 20 years ago was greenlit in the first place. The series takes a lean 85-minute film and torturously stretches its plot points to gratuitous extremes, another modern show that comes across more like an awkwardly-extended movie than anything else. This “thriller” lacks any thrills because we already know almost every character’s fate. Similarly, it fails to bridge the gap between itself and the original, actively diminishing the gravitas of certain characters while answering questions no one was asking. It’s a baffling project, and similar to Gal, I very much need a vacation from these joyless English street corners after having sat through it.

Sexy Beast premieres January 25th on Paramount+. 

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves videogames, film, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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