'Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist' Review: Starry Peacock's Drama Comedy

It takes a while to realize that the hero of Peacock's new crime comedy-drama Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist is not, in fact, any of the convoys of gangsters, thugs and small-time criminals of the series, but, rather, the city of Atlanta. And that the heist of the title, despite the declared financial value, is in reality one of global prestige and recognition

Or maybe the hero of Night of Fight It's Kevin Hart's Chicken Man, not because he's a virtuous or ingenious character, but because Chicken Man represents Atlanta: a troublemaker with big dreams who learns to overcome his dodgy past by thinking about the larger world beyond himself.

All credit to Shaye Ogbonna, who adapted the podcast of the same name, for creating a comedic thriller with the heart of an American Studies thesis. I'm not being sarcastic! Night of Fight has some real things on its mind, plus a ridiculously deep and generally well-rounded ensemble cast. These elements generally make up for the myriad of structural and tonal problems in an eight-hour runtime that's at least two hours overblown and struggling to maintain any momentum.

It's 1970 and Atlanta is a small town, still reeling from the ignominy of its Dixie roots. Chicken Man is an ex-con who runs the numbers game, with the help of his lover and girlfriend Friday Vivian (Taraji P. Henson), knowing full well that his racket is about to be usurped by a state lottery. (Oddly enough, the same subplot plays out in the Apple TV+ series set in Baltimore The Lady in the Lake)

Opportunities for Chicken Man and his hometown come simultaneously in a show that is, to quote, “based on something that really happened.”

Still a divisive figure for his opposition to the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali (Dexter Darden, capturing the champion's cadences if not his physicality) has scheduled his first fight in three years in Atlanta, much to the chagrin of Georgia's segregationist governor, as well as local law enforcement. The event brings controversy to the area, as well as a sea of ​​African-American luminaries, aligning itself with Chicken Man's dream of helping turn the city into a black Las Vegas (mostly for his own benefit, at first). When he hears that the country's top black organized crime figures will be in town, he offers to throw a party in honor of Samuel L. Jackson's infamous Frank Moten. What Chicken Man doesn't know is that there was a previously planned party and previous plans to rob that party, and he will become an easy scapegoat.

The robbery and the mounting body count complicate the life of Detective JD Hudson (Don Cheadle), who is recruited as one of the city's first black cops to protect Ali, despite his ambivalent feelings toward the boxer.

Soon, Chicken Man is making headlines in the local papers as the mastermind behind a crime he didn’t orchestrate, and godfathers from across the country, including Terrence Howard’s Jersey-based Cadillac, are trying to kill him. The real robbers are realizing that what seemed like a low-stakes burglary has a price on their heads, too. Who will be alive when the dust settles, and who will win the battle for Atlanta’s future?

One of the keys to both a good heist and a good heist story is precision, and Night of Fight is a decidedly unwieldy affair. It only has enough story for a two-hour movie, but enough characters for a five-season cable drama, and the effort to reconcile that gap never becomes fluid. In addition to the genre standard and repetitive tweaking of the structure, starting with an unnecessary in the middle of things opening and including multiple flashback reveals like “It was a plan all along!”: this is a show that constantly introduces new characters and then often has to reintroduce them.

If you have Jackson, Howard, Hart, Henson, and Cheadle, the star power alone buys you extra time to give their characters backstories at the end. The A-list stars all have enough material to give performances that are either fully realized or at least tremendously entertaining.

This is probably Hart’s best semi-dramatic work to date, a mix of quick wit and increasingly serious reflection wrapped in wide-collared suits and a perpetually impeccable Afro. Though there are points where Jackson seems to lean heavily into his old Tarantino playbook, only with far less elaborate dialogue, he throws himself into his silver-tongued tough guy act with menacing ease. When it’s time for Jackson and Cheadle, with surely the story’s most complex figure, to share the screen, it’s a total, if all-too-rare, delight. Henson maintains Vivian’s dignity even when the scripts fall back on stale threats of sexual assault, and finds a sass that’s more brittle and less overtly comic than her Emmy-nominated film. Empire tour.

But the actual job participants are played largely by strangers, so the show tells us who everyone is. Then there's the heist where the characters are all wearing masks, so it's impossible to know which people we met halfway through in the previous episode. Then we're told who they are again in the next episode, and then they all spend time in an abandoned nightclub in a later episode and are reintroduced. While I began to recognize them and take an interest in one or two of their fates (there are seven or eight heists before bad things start happening), eventually, each wave of new exposition saps the built-up suspense and emotional investment.

I can see why Ogbonna and company wanted to make sure these roles weren't afterthoughts. They're the systematically oppressed pawns, whether they're the tools of the military-industrial complex abroad or the mysterious powerful men who commissioned the plan. It's interesting to watch the writers try to decide whether they deserve specific sympathy (some of them are pretty bad guys) or just general human empathy. Plus, they're all very well-acted, and there are standout moments for Melvin Gregg, Myles Bullock, Sam Adegoke, and others.

But just as one can sense the writers' desire to flesh out what might otherwise be background figures (see also Artrece Johnson, excellent as Chicken Man's wife, Faye, and Teresa Celeste, combative as the generally undefined Maxine), one can also imagine publishers and audiences eager to see Samuel L. Jackson waving a gun and swearing again, or Don Cheadle hanging out with Muhammad Ali.

Stars: They are a blessing and a curse.

It is a lack of concentration that causes the tone to waver as well. Wanting violence to oscillate between frivolous and meaningful requires a delicacy that Night of Fight rarely owns. An artist like Jackson can still hum empty vulgarity, but the empty violence and cheap tension built on the possibility of rape is exploitative in a story that can’t decide if that’s the direction it wants to go.

Craig Brewer, who directed the first two and final two installments, knows how to tap into a grindhouse aesthetic. The opening credits are B-movie, complete with worn-out film and the vintage NBC peacock logo. Brewer's early episodes use split screens and zooms to capture that late '60s, early '70s feel, but much of the middle of the season is more visually bland. It's a reminder of how much easier it would have been to Night of Fight to maintain levels of coherence like a feature film or maybe a six-part series. There were several points in the middle of the season where my attention waned.

Here’s where the actors kept me watching. The show isn’t consistent, but the world the writers consistently capture gives the stars, newcomers, and veterans of the characters (I don’t want to leave out the vivid work of the likes of Rockmond Dunbar, Ron Reaco Lee, and Michael James Shaw) opportunities to shine.