From its toy automotive high-speed-chase opening credit to the fast-paced melodrama of its storytelling, Max‘s Duster is pedal-to-the-metal escapism. Although it’s as weightless in affect as a Scorching Wheels sizzling rod, the eight-episode motion collection is a superbly pleasurable showcase for Misplaced alum Josh Holloway‘s easy swagger and Cheshire cat charisma as carefree mob-family driver Jim Ellis.
This pulp thriller from J.J. Abrams (Misplaced, Alias) and showrunner LaToya Morgan usually looks like a remnant of the scrappy pre-Max Cinemax model (suppose Banshee, Strike Again, and their rowdy ilk) with its unbelievable twists, elaborate stunts, and garish perspective. Anybody weaned on the ’70s antics of Starsky & Hutch will really feel proper at residence with Ellis, a shaggy neo-Western Casanova who’s “magic on wheels” in his cherry-red 1970 Duster muscle automotive.
It’s a really totally different and extra harmful sleight of hand he’ll need to observe when he’s recruited by novice FBI agent Nina Hayes (the knockout Rachel Hilson) to assist her take down his crime-boss mentor, Ezra Saxton (a silky Keith David). “Mod Squad incoming,” quips certainly one of Nina’s extra poisonous colleagues when this pioneering Black girl in a forbiddingly macho milieu arrives within the Phoenix bureau stuffed with pep and ambition.
And goal. She has a private stake in her vendetta in opposition to Saxton, and when she meets Ellis, she provides him one as properly. Her investigation ruffles feathers method above her pay grade, revealing a conspiracy that goes all the way in which to the Nixon White Home. (The convoluted plot entails probably the greatest “MacGuffins” I’ve seen in an extended whereas, a coveted and mysterious object round which a lot mayhem happens, akin to a Maltese Falcon. When its id is revealed, I laughed out loud.)
The pleasures of Duster embody a gallery of scene-stealers, together with Donal Logue as a corrupt bible-quoting sheriff, Greg Grunberg (an Abrams common) as Nina’s dyspeptic boss, Corbin Bernsen as Ellis’s indulgent dad, and NYPD Blue alum Gail O’Grady as his flamboyantly surly ex-showgirl stepmom. Episodes sometimes open mid-mayhem (backtracking later), and in a single memorable second of disaster, Ellis and Nina debate popping out preventing like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child. She has to remind him that the duo’s dying was implied after the freeze-frame. We belief they’ll be luckier this time.
With a tangy Nineteen Seventies appear and feel, Duster shifts gears confidently between violent cliffhanger crises and knockabout humor. Strap in for the joyride.
Duster, Sequence Premiere, Thursday, Might 15, 9/8c, Max