Smoke

Smoke is like going to a restaurant with a bad waiter. Once the energy's off, it's hard to recoup — no matter how good the food turns out to be.

Taron Egerton plays an arson investigator who begrudgingly teams up with detective Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett) to hunt down two separate arsonists, one of whom may be closer to home than the case file suggests.

The bad waiter, in this case, is Egerton's character. Whether he's narrating his future novel into a voice recorder like a true-crime podcast host, extending his creepy male gaze at every opportunity, or — we shit you not — getting an erection after dousing someone with a fire extinguisher — he gives us the ick. We understand the bit is supposed to be repulsive, but we still have to sit through it for ten episodes. The longer you spend with him, the clearer it gets: he's a sociopath, and not the charming kind. Meanwhile, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, playing the show's other arsonist, is genuinely unnerving — the kind of performance that makes your skin crawl. He gets a hell of an interrogation scene and spends the rest of the season making everyone around him visibly uncomfortable.

Smoke is twisty. It's creepy. Every so often it's even sexy. But it can't settle on a tone — one scene it's poking fun at Egerton's ego and trying to be funny, hokey score and all, the next it's playing dead-serious mystery thriller, and it never finds the fusion of the two.

Some of the ingredients here are decent. The cast is solid. The cat-and-mouse mystery is compelling. Even the arson-investigation angle feels fresh. If you're an Egerton fan or simply enjoy watching things burn, you'll probably find enough to like. But if you're looking for a thriller that moves the needle, there are better options out there.