Super Crooks

Episodes 9-10

At a certain point near the end of Episode 10, Kasey bitterly regards the engagement note that Johnny left in the suit he was going to wear to their wedding, before he idiotically got arrested for boosting a bunch of shops and ATM during his “Bachelor's Party”. He gives a lot of talk about how Kasey was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to him, how she inspired him to change for the better, and all the abandoned bride can mutter is, “You haven't changed at all.”

She's right, too! Johnny started the series as a smug, small-time idiot, and absolutely nothing in the run of Super Crooks has caused him to grow, or to reflect, or to even demonstrate a basic capacity for recognizing his own idiocy. Granted, it isn't like the series has given him that many opportunities to do any of that; one of the weirdest things about Super Crooks is how it keeps insisting that Johnny is supposed to be an interesting main character in between the crimes that the show ostensibly focuses on, and then when the crimes do happen, he barely contributes to anything. The one thing that I can claim to know about Johnny that differentiates him from any of the other one-note characters is that he is in love with Kasey, but even then, the show is just awful at demonstrating that fact. And no, the fact that he will not stop calling Kasey “honey bear” in the dub does not count.

All of this is to say that I'm just repeating the same criticism that I've had from this entire season of Super Crooks: I don't give a single solitary good god damn about what happens to any of these characters, Johnny included, and that has sucked nearly all of the dramatic tension and potential to be entertaining right out of the show. It also doesn't help that the story keeps making the exact wrong decisions at the exact worst times. It's almost as if it actively doesn't want us to enjoy watching it, or to find any of its story developments remotely satisfying.

Take the result of the big helmet heist, for instance: Somehow, the entire Union of Justice falls for the fake zombie apocalypse scheme that TK and Forecast set up, which means that the only hitch in the plan is Praetorian's presence. This (kind of) resolves itself when Praetorian's “Random Powers” gimmick actually backfires for once, but it doesn't end up mattering that the crooks get away because it all goes to hell when The Bastard shows up to Count Orlock's castle with his lackey Praetorian in tow. He steals the helmet, kills Orlock and the butler, and leaves our would-be protagonists right back where they started.

There's a part here where The Bastard makes a big to-do about how all villains are supposed to give a 30% cut of their jobs to The Syndicate, and I could swear that he explicitly tells the crew that he expects further payment on top of Orlock's helmet. Now, this is where you might start to think, “Okay, sure, I see where this is going.” Our hapless antiheroes failed, because of course they did, and now their final heist is going to be a desperate job to pay off The Bastard before he explodes all their heads.

Except, instead of taking the logical route for a story with only three episodes left in its season to go, Super Crooks devotes an entire episode to Johnny and Kasey deciding to up and get married, because their marriage is so important to us, right? Johnny fucks that up by being his usual self, naturally, and then he ends up back in prison for five goddamned years. As if that completely random time-skip wasn't jarring enough, we are also shown how The Heat gets up to his own stupid scheme to rob a casino that ends up with him $100 million dollars in debt to a completely new villain called The Salamander. That is what we get to usher in the final arc of Super Crooks: Total nonsense.

The only reason I can possibly think for the asinine turns that this story has decided to take in its final act is something I discovered when I was scouring the Super Crooks Wikipedia page. Apparently, beginning with Johnny's return to Kasey at the end of Episode 10, we have officially entered into the “adaptation” portion of the series, since what happens here seems to directly match the plot of the 2012 miniseries that Mark Millar created with Leinil Yu. So…everything up until now was just…a prologue? A prologue that decided to take maybe two paragraphs' worth of backstory and stretch it into agonizing thinness across ten episodes before getting to the “real” story?

Look, I'm all for adding your own spin on an adaptation when you get the opportunity to do so, but I genuinely could not tell you what we learned over the last 5/6ths of a season that couldn't have been recapped in an episode or two. Everything you need to know about Johnny and Kasey, for instance, can be summed up in the scene where Johhny walks into Kasey's diner after five years in prison, and he just grins like a complete imbecile and explains that he was only robbing ATMs the night before their wedding for her! Then, he asks her how she ended up in a diner like this, and is shocked to hear about how she failed out of her MBA, because I guess he literally didn't communicate with or even think about her life once in the five years that he was locked up.

In short, we've got a cast comprised entirely of either insufferable dweebs or cardboard cutouts, and all of them stuck inside of a story that still hasn't figured out what it wants to be, even though it's damned near finished. It's utterly exhausting. Will the final episodes prove to be worth all of this hassle, since they'll at least have the source material to work from? I'm not getting my hopes up.

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Super Crooks is currently streaming on Netflix.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.