Critic Reviews

This season, Mucho Mojo is doing something pretty fantastic--you should care enough to watch.

Purefoy and Williams are standouts throughout while Hendricks pretty much settles in. The bloody goings-on apart from their fractious triangle can be jolts from out of the blue. But there’s always some cauterizing banter just around the corner.

A terrifically offbeat caper, serving up a sultry, sexy brew of wry humor with flashes of psycho suspense. [29 Feb-6 Mar 2016, p.17]

It succeeds in being strange, funny, tense, and emotional, with the relationship between Leonard and Hap--who behave like brothers and often like kids--as its shining core.

Hap and Leonard works its strengths slowly, until you’re eager to see where these characters are headed next and how they’ll work their way out of what looks like an increasing degree of trouble.

There are times when it’s a little too relaxed for its own good, and it has trouble reconciling its wit and sexiness with bursts of harrowing violence that feel imported from a Quentin Tarantino movie (or a film by one of Tarantino’s imitators). But the sum total is so beguiling and unusual--for television as a whole, if not for Sundance, which specializes in this kind of storytelling--that it’s hard not to become entranced by it.

The first episode is packed with juicy moments, in terms of both character and unexpected plot twists. By the end of the pilot, the show's combination of thematic thoughtfulness, buddy criminal character moments, and shocking blood spatter are very much in place.

Inconvenient as that is, and fear takes many forms here, the first three episodes of Hap and Leonard sucked me in almost as easily as Trudy pulls Hap.

The oaken friendship in Hap and Leonard allows the plotline’s racial context to feel more affecting and salient than other higher-profile series addressing similar themes. Williams and Purefoy are an incredible comedy team, perking up the bleakest situations with their back-and-forth bickering. Those moments earn the viewer’s investment in the toughest parts of the story and never allow the energy in Hap and Leonard to deflate.

The new episodes are more nimble and fun without ever undercutting the tragedies at the heart of the story, and as a result it’s a better showcase for the appealing leads.