Meanwhile, every side character just seems like more trouble than they’re worth, with most of them feeling like they’re at best one Google search smarter than the audience about everything from safe cracking to explosives. We’re told over and over again Leo Pap is a master thief, but all we see is him bungle a few low-level jobs earlier in life. Worst of all, it’s not even clear why any of them are here. On their own, each character is flat and boring, but together they turn into a mess of yelling and confused motivations. Rather than slow-playing the build-up of Leo’s crew, Kaleidoscope throws them all together quickly, and mostly over the course of just one episode - which proves not to be a sign that the group-dynamic is the highlight of the show, but rather a vast miscalculation about the cast of characters and their chemistry. Kaleidoscope’s gimmick renders that kind of perfectly-guided fun almost impossible.īut it’s not like the release format is the fundamental issue of the show either: it’s boring, no matter what order the episodes came in.
#Netflix sign up something wrong movie#
Just like a great heist, a great heist movie requires perfect timing, giving out character reveals at just the right moment, knowing when the story needs a new complication, and throwing shocking twists in at exactly the right moment for maximum audience impact.
But for those narratives to work, they need clockwork precision. Non-linear storytelling is a hallmark of the heist genre, particularly for the slightly more modern version of it, like the Oceans movies or Reservoir Dogs. There’s no improv, just carefully crafted precision, and problems only experts can solve. Kaleidoscope’s basic assumption was wrong the whole time.
While this format is almost interesting at first blush, its problems become clear with a little more thought: There’s nothing fundamentally interesting about learning things in a random order. One somewhat interesting note about the randomization, though, is that there do seem to be a few limits on which episodes can appear where, and everyone ends with the same two, the heist and its aftermath. Rather than any kind of actual personality for the characters or anything else that might make you care about them, we get first-day-of-class fun facts like one character liking the play the drums or another wanting to retire to the beach. Even when the show is layering on extraneous details in these episodes, they really only amount to relationship drama between two or more members of the crew. You could get a preliminary heist as your midpoint, or you could get several episodes worth of flashbacks about Leo and his former partner, or the stunningly incompetent FBI agent who’s chasing him and his crew. You might start with an introduction to the crew, or just to Leo. Image: Netflixīut again, the order you learn about any of this is mostly up in the air. To pull off the job, Leo gets together a crew that includes Ava Mercer (Paz Vega), Judy Goodwin (Rosaline Elbay), Stan Loomis (Peter Mark Kendall), RJ Acosta (Jordan Mendoza), and Bob Goodwin (Jai Courtney) - I’d describe the characters more, but the show doesn’t bother, so why should I. Kaleidoscope, created by Eric Garcia ( Repo Men), follows Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito, who seems to pick a new voice at random at the start of each episode), a former thief looking to return to the life for one last job.ĭepending on the order of your episodes, when we meet Leo he’s either about to break out of prison, or he’s dead set on revenge via the biggest job he can think of: hitting his former partner who now runs a security company with a high-tech underground vault. Unfortunately, the show never really makes a song worth listening to, and mostly feels like a din of out-of-tune instruments, no matter what order they’re in.
#Netflix sign up something wrong series#
At least, that’s the hope behind Netflix’s new heist series Kaleidoscope, which gives each viewer a randomized episode order. It’s tempting to believe a great heist story, whether it’s in a movie or a series, is like great jazz: A collection of seemingly disparate parts, each excellent but incomplete on their own, get combined together to create something transcendent.
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