Money Heist embraces its screw-ups, making it the anti–Ocean’s Eleven

Slate

The Netflix Spanish heist crime drama loves its criminals "for their soft underbellies and their frequent, outrageous mistakes," says Lili Loofbourow. "This can be frustrating at first. If you start watching expecting a show about the tidy mind-blowing clockwork of a perfect atraco, as I did, you’ll find plenty of defects. The action sequences, for instance are abundant and silly, featuring almost parodically inconsequential hailstorms of bullets. So is the melodramatic style, which launches with a fatalistic narrator—Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), traumatized and on the run after a bank heist gone wrong gets her boyfriend killed—and proceeds to toggle wildly between the heist and astonishingly inefficient flashbacks. Frankly, no one seems quite up to what they’re about to attempt—taking hostages in the Royal Mint of Spain and delaying the police for as long as they can in order to print as much money as possible. The genius Professor, who has gathered the crew in an old villa in the countryside to prepare, is nerdy and nervous and monastic. He’s the perfect opposite of cool, and the gang he’s recruited doesn’t seem exactly brilliant. One looks like a teenager, the two Serbs barely speak at first, and the father in a father-son team is explicitly concerned about his son’s stupidity. People fraternize despite the Professor’s strict instructions not to, and a hothead has within just a couple of hours of the heist’s beginning violated the Professor’s directive not to attack law enforcement. So much for the plan. That, strangely enough, starts to become the real pleasure of Money Heist. No one is particularly good at the roles the genre dictates they should play—not the police, not the military, and not the crooks. The brilliance of the Professor’s plan turns out to be its resilience to f*ck-ups. He doesn’t despair when someone in the crew does something dumb, because he’s factored dumbness in. He f*cks up, too."