In the new Prime Video thriller Steal, a midlevel employee at an investment firm is caught in the middle after a massive heist removed billions of pounds of money from pension and other retirement funds. Is this going to be one of those twisty thrillers that goes off the rails, or will it stay focused?
STEAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Scenes of London, and people walking to get to work.
The Gist: We alternate between the beginning of the day at Lochmill Captial, which is an investment firm that manages penchant and retirement funds, and a group of mysterious people taking the Tube and walking towards the building Lochmill is in. Zara Dunne (Sophie Turner), a trade processor at Lochmill, is in the loo dealing with a hangover-induced bloody nose, when she gets a call about Myrtle Clark (Eloise Thomas), an intern starting that day. She brings Myrtle through the office and introduces her to Luke (Archie Madekwe) the lead trade processor.
Just as they are about to start their day, the group that had been gathering in the building arrive on the 27th floor and take out their guns. Some of the gunmen go to the conference room where the executives are meeting; the others, including the ringleader, herd the cubicle dwellers into a different conference room. They smash one of the office workers in the face when he tells them that shooting a gun inside will attract too much attention.
The ringleader, London (Jonathan Slinger), is looking for trade processors to help put through six trades he has on a USB drive. The total of the trades is a breathtaking £4 billion, which will empty out the pension funds that so many average people counted on for their retirements. Luke puts through the trades, but then the other group needs three execs to sign off on them. There are other steps before the money gets deposited in the thieves’ account, and while Luke has a near breakdown in the process of helping, Zara smoothly handles phone calls from bankers checking in on the unusually large trades.
One of the workers signals another building, but the thieves end up leaving before the police show up. DCI Rhys Covaci (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), the senior investigative officer, approaches Zara for questioning because she was one of the ones who interacted with the thieves the most.
Photo: Ludovic Robert/Prime
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Sotiris Nikias, Steal is reminiscent of other intense British thrillers like Hijack.
Our Take: By the end of the first episode of Steal, you get the feeling that the mostly-anonymous thieves, who just committed the largest armed robbery in UK history, had some help. Not only do we hear Zara overhear some of her coworkers speculate about it while she’s dealing with another nosebleed in the loo, but it just seemed like London, the ringleader, knew far too much about the trade process to not have gotten some inside information.
Also, we see Zara start to smile as she overhears her coworkers talk about an “inside man.” It’s pretty obvious that she’s involved, though we don’t know to what extent and how she’ll be caught in the middle as Rhys and other law enforcement starts investigating.
While the first episode was appropriately tense, quickly cutting between scenes to amp up the tension, the meat of this thriller is going to come as Zara, Rhys and probably Luke get in deeper with whomever ordered such a massive theft from people who can ill afford the money disappearing. And, given the “this season on” montage we saw at the end of the episode, Rhys has some issues of his own that he’s going to have to deal with as he investigates the case.
Photo: Ludovic Robert/Prime
Performance Worth Watching: Sophie Turner’s Zara strikes a good balance between what she knows about the heist and what she doesn’t know that might end up killing her.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Zara smiles in a toilet stall while overhearing her coworkers speculate on whether the thieves had an inside man.
Sleeper Star: We don’t know a heck of a lot about some of the other people at the firm, but Harry Michell as Milo Carter-Walsh, is more involved in the story somehow.
Most Pilot-y Line: We spent a lot of the first episode wondering why all the thieves looked so strange. We finally figured out that they were using prosthetics to hide their identities, rather than wear cumbersome masks.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Will the six episodes of Steal be full of tension-filled twists and turns or just spiral out into silliness? We’re certainly interested enough in the story after the first episode to find out, but given that the running time is only about five or so hours, we’re hoping things will stay tight and tense.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.