'Nemesis' Review: Netflix's Pulpy, Fun 'Heat' Knockoff
Y’Lan Noel in ‘Nemesis’
Saeed Adyani/Netflix
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We need to talk about the existence, or lack thereof, of Michael Mann’s Heat in Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole’s new Netflix drama, Nemesis.
Nemesis is a series with a smart understanding of pop culture, starting in the pilot’s opening seconds, featuring Y’lan Noel’s Coltrane Wilder, the slick leader of a tight gang of master thieves, arriving at a Halloween party in a black Kangol and bulky gold medallion.
Nemesis
The Bottom Line
Pulpy, entertaining and derivative.
Airdate: Thursday, May 14
Cast: Matthew Law, Y'lan Noel, Cleopatra Coleman, Tre Hale, Domenick Lombardozzi, Jonnie Park, Ariana Guerra, Gabrielle Dennis, Michael Potts, Sophina Brown, Cedric Joe, Jeff Pierre
Creators: Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole
It takes only mid-level awareness to recognize that Coltrane is dressed as Nino Brown from the 1991 classic New Jack City and only a step more awareness to know that Mario Van Peebles, director and star of New Jack City, directed the first two episodes of Nemesis (and collaborated with Kemp on Power and Power Book III: Raising Kanan).
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Other direct references abound throughout the first season of Nemesis, including an efficient criminal facilitator watching Van Peebles’ father’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in the second of his two episodes.
With Heat, maybe not the definitive Los Angeles crime movie but certainly a definitive Los Angeles crime movie, the direct citations are more fleeting, including Clipse’s “Let God Sort ‘Em Out,” which closes the third episode and includes the lyric, “Heat come, I’m De Niro.”
The bigger-picture nods to Heat, however, are everywhere in Nemesis, to the point that if you told me Nemesis had been developed as a straight-up series remake of Heat only to transition from “adapted from” to “inspired by” to “uncredited,” I would believe it.
Even before the climactic Nemesis action set piece, in which a team of robbers wearing stylized hockey masks engage in a shootout with the cops in the middle of a Los Angeles street in broad daylight — Century City stepping in for Downtown L.A. — the implied links between the two texts are so frequent and so obvious that it would be negligent not to connect them. And it’s perplexing that at no point do either of the series’ dueling adversaries comment on the way similar conflict played out in Heat, treating it as a cautionary tale.
This is not to say that Nemesis is ripping Heat off without attribution.
Kemp, Marole and Nemesis are having a conversation with Heat, looking at what the film does well and where it occasionally suffers or lacks and saying, “What can we do with the shape of this thing that would make it reflect crime, policing and geography in Los Angeles in 2026?”
So it’s Heat with a pair of Black protagonists, Heat with Baldwin Hills replacing the Hollywood Hills and coastal real estate porn, Heat with the female leads elevated to actual characterizations rather than just cyphers meant to illustrate the monomania of the two leads.
Of course, it’s also Heat without De Niro and Pacino, and there’s no way for that to not be a major diminution of quality, one of many.
Still, Nemesis is a soapy serialized thriller that embraces its emotional excesses and occasional detours of narrative ludicrousness. Some of those story choices and character decisions irritated me, and the less than ideal central casting proved a frequent liability, but I never found Nemesis to be anything less than pulpy and entertaining — an overstuffed eight-episode B-movie that concludes with a gaping cliffhanger that absolutely left me ready for the action to continue.
As I said, Noel plays Coltrane — “My name may be Coltrane, but I do not play that improvisational shit when it comes to jobs” — the leader of a gang of high-stakes thieves that includes former sniper Choi (Jonnie Park), Coltrane’s prison buddy Stro (Tre Hale) and mercurial Deon (Quincy Isaiah), who is basically Val Kilmer from Heat as “guy whose gambling problem adds complications.” It’s all facilitated with the help of the mysterious Charlie (Sophina Brown) in the Jon Voight part.
The gang pulls off four carefully planned robberies per year, no more and no less, but Coltrane has been distracted after his wife Ebony’s (Cleopatra Coleman) mis