{"id":226841,"date":"2026-03-19T11:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T11:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/226841\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T11:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T11:54:08","slug":"double-stakes-review-stimulating-ukrainian-tale-of-cops-and-thieves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/226841\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Double Stakes’ review: Stimulating Ukrainian tale of cops and thieves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Even as a not insignificant portion of the nation draws a blanket of isolationism, xenophobia and monolinguality ever more tightly around itself, another faction has grown more interested in what\u2019s happening around the world, and more accepting of TV shows and movies not in English. (You may have noticed a few of these at Sunday\u2019s Oscars<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Netflix, a global company, has a \u201cbrowse by language\u201d button at the top of its home page, with offerings in Turkish, Malay, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Polish and Cantonese, among others, along with the more familiar French, Korean, Spanish and Japanese. There\u2019s value in seeing how other countries see themselves when they\u2019re not putting on a show for us.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to \u201cDouble Stakes,\u201d a Ukrainian police and thieves series premiering in the U.S. Thursday on Viaplay, a Swedish-owned streaming service whose main business is Nordic noir, a genre so popular that many American streamers give it its own corner. Because there are so many of those series, it\u2019s easy not to write about any of them; but a show from Ukraine doesn\u2019t come along every day \u2014 or any day. And given that it arrives from a nation fighting a war we used to think more about here before other wars started blocking the view, and because I felt I had only the vaguest idea of the actual place, and because it\u2019s where all my great-grandparents came from, it piqued my interest, and I dived in. It was a most enjoyable swim.<\/p>\n

Igor Shvedov (Vlad Nikitiuk) returns from the front after six years working in military intelligence, with a set of skills that will come in handy through the adventures that follow. Fresh off the bus in his camouflage gear and dog tag, he reunites with his older brother, Anton, whom he knows only as \u201cthe owner of a construction company, and not only that,\u201d with maybe a bit of a pre-legitimate past \u201cin the \u201990s.\u201d (Characters are always talking about the \u201990s, as if they were the Wild West.) But quicker than you can say \u201cVolodymyr Zelensky,\u201d Anton is felled by an assassin\u2019s bullet.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

\u201cDouble Stakes\u201d is set in Ukraine and involves former soldier Igor, who learns about his brother\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

(Viaplay)<\/p>\n

Igor goes to see Bayun (Yakov Kucherevskyi), his brother\u2019s friend and associate of 30 years, who will hip Igor to the facts that Anton, called \u201cthe Swede\u201d (Shved being Ukrainian for Swede) was in fact one of the city\u2019s main crime bosses, and that the likely author of his murder is one of three others: Crab, a brute; Count, who puts on airs; or Knave (called Jack), a slick \u201ctrickster.\u201d You can think of them as the Joker, the Penguin and the Riddler in TV Batman<\/a> terms, if you don\u2019t think too hard. (There\u2019s no one-to-one correspondence.)<\/p>\n

Bayun, who is now in charge of Anton\u2019s business, is more of a Baloo, comical and relatively sweet and something of a guide to Igor. (That their gang never dealt drugs is the thing that separates the decent criminals from the decadent.) We are meant to like him, and do. He\u2019s additionally dignified by his smart girlfriend, Murka (Anna Guliayeva), who has a level head, mad hacker skills and tattoos. He\u2019s studying German, for no apparent reason, and throws phrases into his dialogue to amusing effect.<\/p>\n

In order to find his brother\u2019s killer, Igor joins the police, where, as a \u201ccombat veteran, a scout, with an excellent legal and physical training,\u201d he\u2019s immediately given a badge and the rank of lieutenant. The police, who are currently concerned about the disappearance of an undercover officer, have their own uses for him. Not all the coppers will turn out to be good \u2014 there are the corrupt and ambitious among them \u2014 but two are, Lena (Daryna Egorkina) and Oleksa (Valentyn Tomusiak), once trust has been established. Igor, for his part, is the sort of hero who, unless he is tied up, drugged or hit from behind, will get the best of any opponent; even one with a gun. (He has been scouted by the national MMA team.) \u201cThe guys are a little afraid of you,\u201d he\u2019ll be told regarding his reputation in the underworld. \u201cYou\u2019ve been shot so many times \u2014 and nothing.\u201d Like Tennyson\u2019s Sir Galahad<\/a>, he has the strength of 10 because his heart is pure.<\/p>\n

References to the war with Russia come mostly at the top. Igor gets into a tussle with thuggish barflies who object to his turning up the sound on a TV report from the front; Vika (Oleksandra Syzonenko), whom he rescues from the same bar and who\u2019ll become his girlfriend in a trice, was orphaned when her parents\u2019 house was hit by a bomb; Igor\u2019s unit, he learns, was supplied with guns and ammunition by Anton\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

The story, which involves undercover agents and snitches among both the police and warring groups of gangsters, can be hard to track; it doesn\u2019t help that many characters are called by more than one name, and that those names are Ukrainian. (The subtitles are not especially consistent on spelling, either.) But it is also refreshingly straightforward. By Hollywood standards, the production is basic, lo-fi \u2014 sets with little decoration, no special effects, flat photography, askew subtitles (\u201cDo speak bluntly,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got a misfortune,\u201d \u201cWhat made you so grumpish?\u201d). As stylish as \u201cDouble Stakes\u201d ever gets is canting the camera at a 45-degree angle, like we did in the \u201960s.<\/p>\n

As a result little stands between you and the actors, appealing or unappealing according to their characters. Notwithstanding its many tropes and poses \u2014 some borrowed from American movies \u2014 or perhaps because of those tropes and poses, it feels honest, made by humans, oddly appealing, even though much of it involves people trying to kill one another. The characters are not in themselves complicated or ambiguous; it\u2019s as psychologically simple as \u201cStar Wars\u201d was, to start \u2014 and you know how that worked out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even as a not insignificant portion of the nation draws a blanket of isolationism, xenophobia and monolinguality ever…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[103251,103255,6193,103253,15722,103250,48,52,51,47,50,49,103254,76337,1594,6196,8041,4119,51205,103252,2664],"class_list":["post-226841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-anton","tag-bayun","tag-character","tag-double-stakes","tag-front","tag-igor-shvedov","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-main-business","tag-old-brother","tag-other","tag-set","tag-thief","tag-top","tag-tv-show","tag-ukrainian-police","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}