Steal Review: Sophie Turner Stars in an Amazon Thriller That Yields Diminishing Returns

For about the first hour, Amazon Prime Video’s Steal is a pretty slick little thriller.

Sophie Turner is believably terrified yet levelheaded as Zara, a London office worker whose employer, Lochmill Capital, is swarmed by a team of robbers. Said robbers, armed with giant guns, elaborate disguises and a suspiciously intimate understanding of the company’s inner workings, are plausibly menacing. The heist is impeccably organized and enjoyably tense, and in the end everything goes as planned for the criminals — yielding a take of four billion dollars, the largest in the country’s history.

But if that premiere, directed by Sam Miller, sets the tone for a fat-free thriller that gets in, does what it needs to do and then gets out before we know what hit us, the next five episodes struggle to keep up the momentum. Doing somehow both too much and too little, Steal keeps asking questions past the point where I’d stopped caring about the answers.

Since we watch the job as it happens, the question driving Steal is not really how the robbers pulled it off, or whether they’ll get away with it. The mysteries that nag at Rhys (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), the determined policeman assigned the case, are who masterminded the operation and why. With precious few leads to go on, his interest is drawn first to Zara and Luke (Archie Madekwe), her work bestie — the two employees forced, at gunpoint, to work most closely with the thieves. Zara and Luke, for their part, are running scared, relieved to have gotten out but paranoid of being seen as loose ends that need tying up.

Creator Sotiris Nikias drops a couple of juicy bombs early on, about the extent of the plan, the violent lengths its conspirators are willing to go and Zara’s own audacious but ill-advised efforts to protect herself and Luke. But the returns diminish as the hours add up and the layers of the conspiracy grow increasingly murky and abstract.

For a while it works well enough as a star vehicle for Turner, who imbues Zara with a compelling mix of shrewdness and humor, determination and vulnerability. But because her Zara doesn’t quite sync with the one described repeatedly in the dialogue — “an office worker whose life is so pointless she has to get wasted every weekend just to bear it,” as one cop (Ellie James) bluntly puts it — the character ultimately feels incomplete.

The other principal players are even less well-developed, with Rhys getting a thematically relevant but narratively uninteresting gambling addiction in lieu of a personality, and Luke being built almost entirely from Madekwe’s ability to project tear-streaked desperation. (Credit where it’s due — he is very good at it.) Andrew Koji is initially intriguing as Darren, a soft-spoken but tenacious financial crimes investigator, but is ill-served by haphazard turns that render him more a plot engine than a cohesive character.

The various relationships between them seem driven more by narrative contrivance than organic chemistry; to the end I could not figure out how close Zara and Luke were meant to be, or whether the flirtation between Zara and Rhys was meant to read as self-destructive or life-affirming.

This is because Steal‘s real central subject is money, about which it wants to say much but ends up saying too little of coherence. More than their personalities or their backstories or their roles in their investigation, the characters are defined by their relationship to coin — having it, needing it, the things they’ll do to get it or at least not lose it.

Possessing it is what allows a wealthy defense contractor like Sir Tony (guest star Peter Mullan) to treat law enforcement with contempt even when the stolen money shows up in his own offshore accounts, casting him under a cloud of suspicion. Not having it powers the resentment worker bees like Luke and Zara feel for colleagues like Milo (Harry Michell), who, they gripe, earns several times their pay off of their own hard work. Steal‘s world, like ours, is one rotted by a capitalistic system in which, as one character angrily charges, “millions [are] dying of hunger, and the people who’ve decided this is how it is, they’re flying their private jets over forest fires.”

Having invoked these big and relevant themes, however, the series seems not to know what else to say about them. The points it’s making about how destructive our financial system is are not wrong, but they’re too obvious and facile to make up for the show’s bloated pacing and two-dimensional characters — especially since, in the end, it lacks the nerve to follow its own logic anywhere truly daring or surprising.

“All this chaos. For what? A fireworks show,” fumes Rhys once the dust has settled and the truth come to light, and though the mastermind would be eager to disagree, it’s hard to find fault with the detective on this point. Steal starts with a bang, and means to go out with one too. Instead, backed into a corner, it finishes with a shrug.