The two stars of the new drama Black Rabbit, Jude Law and Jason Bateman, are respectively the hero and the nemesis of the male receding hairline. Their characters are opposed in other ways. They are the Friedken brothers, Jake and Vince, and, at the beginning of the show, have not spoken since their mother’s death.
Jake (Jude Law) is triumphant when we first see him. He has built the Black Rabbit restaurant into the hottest spot in New York. It sells “$50 hamburgers” and imports “beet tincture” for its negronis. His chef de cuisine, Rox, and influencer associate, Wes, keep the queue running down the street. Jake strolls through the tables like a king surveying his kingdom. A tap of his teaspoon on a bottle brings the room to a reverent hush, into which he can deliver a charismatic toast. Friends say, “Look at you, you’re beautiful!”
Local legend has it that Vince (Jason Bateman) was “half as handsome, twice as smart”. But, at first, he exists only as that legend. He has not been seen in New York for some time – nor in the brothers’ Connecticut hometown. When he finally appears, it’s with a gun pressed to his face. He’s being held up by criminal “buyers” of a rare coin collection he’s trying to flog. True to form, the cat never gets his tongue: he shouts and swears at the crooks, and when they make off with his coins, he haphazardly runs one of them over. Twice.
With that, he’s on the phone to Jake, begging for a ticket to New York. Jake moans to a friend that Vince “just takes up so much oxygen”. The arch reply comes: “Oh yeah, what’s that like?” In truth, the two brothers are not so dissimilar. Both are clever, aggressive “hustlers”. Jake has a man in the New York Times office spying on the food critic’s secret calendar for him. Vince knows how to walk into a rich man’s game of craps with nothing and come out with tens of thousands. They are sons of the same abusive father and shared a difficult childhood, the harrowing details of which are gradually revealed.
When they reunite, Vince tells Jake, “You got everything. I’m 52 and I got zero.” But Jake has a lot less than everything. Only two years into the Black Rabbit he is already scheming to take over the prestigious Pool Room restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel, for which he needs a lot of money. Vince, meanwhile, has far less than nothing. Soon after returning to his old stomping grounds, he is cornered in a park by two thugs, who claim he owes £140,000 and slice his finger as a warning.
As such, neither is exempt from suspicion in the heist that opens the show. While a party is in full swing at the Black Rabbit, two armed men in balaclavas break in through the supply door and attempt to open the jewellery safe. When it won’t budge, they storm into the party, brandishing their guns.
So, Black Rabbit stakes its intrigue with fairly crude tools: we want to know who did it. The show does not always escape the cartoonish. The menace of the otherwise unthreatening crime boss relies entirely on the gimmick of being deaf and mute, communicating solely in sign language. He is played by Troy Kotsur, the first deaf male actor ever to win an Oscar, but the writing is too thin to be rescued by the performance. At one point, Jake is overwhelmed with stress. To convey this, a conversation is muffled by a vague blood-rush noise that drains to silence on the words “right, Jake?”, spoken by a character who later asks, “Where did you go back there?” It’s a cliché, and one unsuited to an alert, neurotic character like Jake. The show’s climax is delivered with dialogue too cheesy for Chuck E Cheese, let alone a sophisticated establishment such as the Black Rabbit.
But the show’s efforts towards the profound often succeed. The relationship between one of the petty crooks and Vince is sensitively drawn. Even when one is cutting off the other’s finger, the two are familiars rather than foes. The crook explains that he must protect his reputation, and Vince already understands. In the most squalid stratum of the lowlife, both villain and victim are resigned to the same sad logic. Law and Bateman deliver magnetic performances as aggressive charismas under tremendous strain. Black Rabbit is high-calorie drama.
Black Rabbit
Netflix
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This article appears in the 17 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Can Zohran Mamdani save the left?
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