Amazon Primes Addictive Thriller ZeroZeroZero Depicts a Global Drug Deal Gone Wrong | TV/Streamin

This is revealed to be a business where you can either control or be controlled, and Manuel (a quietly insidious Harold Torres) embodies that with his own arc of rising from a church-going special forces sergeant nicknamed “Vampire” to aspirational Mexican cartel leader, who uses his professional training as a way to dominate Monterrey with his own army of men who are armed, fast, and loyal. Manuel’s arc takes “ZeroZeroZero” to some very dark, unrelentingly bleak places, but it too works as a study in evil, disconnected from the other two major stories. His story gets bigger and bigger as he starts to gain control, especially as Manuel builds his army with dozens of men training for war, and yet it always comes back to the wavering power within Torres’ stoic presence. Sometimes it’s the haunting look of a stone-cold, sociopathic tyrant, but in a few weaker dramatic beats its the look of someone whose established intricate conscience dissipates with each tactful act of brutality. 

“ZeroZeroZero” takes the moral stance of a Martin Scorsese project, in that it stands back from such various degrees of evil, and lets God sort them out. To become enmeshed with such villains in a high-paced story can be invigorating at first, but it flags when the series proves to share little insight into its focal subject, as if withholding the massive research that clearly inspired the series and the book. Instead, though episode one features Gabriel Byrne’s cheesy voiceover getting didactic about on drug dealing, the show is more reliant on its confident narrative style, of endless betrayals and bids for power, all while trying to give some gritty coolness to the business at hand. 

An expansive and bleak epic like this is rounded out by its filmmaking vigor, of which “ZeroZeroZero” has plenty of. Its action scenes can burst into some genuinely thrilling car chases, shootouts, and shocking kills, all which make some of its hokier visual missteps (like the way it always suddenly goes into dramatic slow motion to switch arcs) easier to forgive. “ZeroZeroZero” prevails in creating a rich world with its interconnected nature; its scope becomes a weapon itself, sobering you up with just how far everything goes. It’s the kind of thriller that makes such a deep impression because it can think big and small at the same time, uniting three gripping individual stories into one massive saga.

Whole season screened for review.

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