Sophie Turner’s Amazon Prime thriller starts with a bang but ends on a whimper

From the outside looking in, Sophie Turner’s new Amazon Prime Video series Steal appears to be exactly what it says on the tin.

Ordinary office worker Zara (Turner) becomes entangled in a major heist at work alongside her best friend Luke (Archie Madekwe), while DCI Rhys Covac (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) investigates.

It boasts all the elements I’ve come to expect from thrillers. Panicked decision-making, gun violence, and a risqué romance to top it all off.

However, much to my surprise, crime novelist Sotiris Nikias’ screenwriting debut absolutely knocked me off my seat with an electric opening two episodes that left me eating some very humble pie.

The six-part series begins with a group of armed robbers disguised as office workers using what appears to be botched Star Trek makeup on their faces to evade facial recognition on CCTV as they storm into a London office.

After bruising their way through the front desk using fake passes, their demand is issued. They want £4billion (yes, billion) of people’s pension money, or they will start to kill off staff.

Outside of this quite outrageous demand (I reversed it back to check, it was really £4billion), what was most refreshing about Nikias’ work was how sophisticated and slick this opening situation felt.

Despite how outlandish £4billion sounded, everything felt strangely real, dodgy Star Trek makeup and all.

In a world where exposition has run rampant in TV, finally, here was a series that grabbed you by the scruff of the neck and showed you the action, without falling over hurdles to explain itself.

It felt like the show’s creators actually trusted the audience to work out what was happening as a pulsating score propelled you throughout its story.

And at every predictable moment, the show took another route that never felt contrived.

This continued up until a dramatic twist at the end of episode one that suggests Turner’s character Zara may have known more about this heist than previously suggested.

However, much like the ill-fated robbery at the centre of this story, Steal slowly starts to crumble as it goes on.

For all of its positive creative choices early on, the thriller casually introduces MI5 into the story, and not in a good way, with a rather bizarre inclusion of Anna Maxwell Martin in a role that seems almost identical to Line of Duty.

Overall, things begin to happen just a little bit too easily and conveniently.

Suddenly, Zara becomes an expert police detective who can swab fingerprints and track down a vicious gang.

This, coupled with some rather lazy attempts to shoehorn in her backstory and lack of belonging in society, felt like a different show compared to the tight, pacy storytelling of the heist.

A haunting twist at the end of episode four and a final shootout in episode five are not enough to save the show’s steady decline.

As the series went on, I felt myself wishing that this was just a story about the robbery and that we stayed inside that London office for the entirety of the series.

Steal is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from January 21.

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