On Screen: “Black Rabbit”
Black Rabbit
Someone once said: “When you’re in a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal.” I believed that until I watched Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear.” That changed everything. I had hoped “Black Rabbit” might continue the frenetic fun — but, sadly, it flopped.
This slow-paced Netflix miniseries begins with a brazen armed robbery in the midst of a celebration at a trendy, new three-story Lower Manhattan restaurant near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Flashback to a month earlier — when savvy restaurateur Jake Friedkin (Jude Law) takes his older scumbag brother Vince (Jason Bateman) back into the business.
Jake has been working day and night to make Black Rabbit pub a smashing success and a three-star review from the New York Times critic has just vindicated his efforts. Plus, Black Rabbit’s talented female chef, Roxie (Amaka Okafor), is slated for a New York Magazine cover story.
Jake’s dream is to turn Black Rabbit into a hip brand by opening a bigger, better restaurant uptown — specifically, reconfiguring the fabled Pool Room atop New York’s posh Four Seasons Hotel.
But then there’s Vince, who — after co-founding Black Rabbit with Jake — has been hiding out in Reno. Vince is a whiny grifter with $140,000 in gambling debt. That’s obvious from the moment he appears on the scene and augmented in an awkward encounter with his estranged tattoo artist daughter (Odessa Young).
Creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman skirt in and out of the criminal underworld, never fully committing to an urban crime drama, even though there’s an obvious villain, menacing mobster Joe Mancuso (Oscar-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur), whose ties to the Friedkin brothers go back to Coney Island.
Problem is: while actor-director Jason Bateman was able to artfully juggle financial disaster, family crises and ethical and moral dilemmas for four seasons of “Ozark,” it doesn’t work here. You just don’t care about these miserably dysfunctional, co-dependent brothers or their stumbling subplots.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Black Rabbit” is a boring, bleak 4 — with all eight episodes streaming on Netflix.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.