Netflix's 'Nemesis' Would Be Great If It Were Any Good

I’m sure that everyone who has written about Nemesis so far has noted comparisons to Heat, which doesn’t leave me a lot of space for creativity in my review. Because it is Heat — if Heat were set in the Baldwin Hills instead of the Hollywood Hills, if Heat were shepherded by Courtney A. Kemp (creator of the Power universe) instead of Michael Mann, and if it starred Matthew Law and Y’lan Noel instead of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

The setting of Heat may not have been crucial to its success, but the screenwriting, the directing, and the performances certainly were, and Nemesis is subpar on two-and-a-half of those three counts. I’ll grant that many of the action sequences are well-executed — kinetic, propulsive, occasionally genuinely thrilling — but beyond those, Nemesis is so bloated, so clichéd, and so derivative that the Heat comparisons are not only inevitable but unfavorable. It’s what 2 Days in the Valley was to Pulp Fiction: a cringe remake that mistakes the architecture of a classic for the soul of one.

I love the idea of an intense, all-consuming rivalry between a detective, Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law), and a master criminal, Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel). But there is homage, and there is a rip-off. Nemesis is Heat padded out with Lifetime levels of family drama, painfully awkward dialogue, and performances made worse by the impossible shadow of De Niro and Pacino looming over every scene.

I might have been able to overlook some of those inadequacies — or at least appreciate the Gerard Butler-movie-grade action sequences for what they are — if the show weren’t so wildly overstuffed, overlong, and predictable in its twists and tragedies (spoiler alert: they all come at the end of the episode). It’s Heat designed with Netflix’s Next button in mind. Each episode ebbs in the middle but surges at the beginning and end, like a river engineered to wake white-water rafters from their stupor every 40 minutes only to lull them right back to sleep.

And then, after putting us through all of that — the telegraphed showdowns, the character deaths visible from two episodes out, the false line readings, the implausible plot turns — Nemesis has the audacity not to wrap itself up, but to ask us to come back for another eight episodes, possibly more, to see how it all ends. When all we have to do is watch Heat again to already know. The juice is not only not worth the squeeze, but my hand is tired from from Nemesis’s attempt to squeeze blood out of a lemon.