Netflix’s Lupin Part 3: Omar Sy is magnetic in this endlessly entertaining heist drama

Omar Sy reprises his role as Assane Diop in Lupin 3. (Screen shot/Youtube/Netflix)

“Lupin never dies,” is a line that repeats throughout the third part of Netflix’s beloved caper series. It’s a bold declaration that the suave frontman of this endlessly engaging show makes, through both words and actions. What made this series a rousing success over its first two parts was its proletariat stance and its perpetual flip-flopping between steals and reveals. There is never not a good time to watch a determined but restrained thief rob the rich with consummate, condescending ease, but what made Lupin incredibly watchable beyond the obviating genius of its lead, was the personal backdrop to which his crimes were tied. After having had his revenge against Pellegrini, the man who wrongfully framed his working-class father at the end of the second season, chances were thin for an equally sensational encore. Except Lupin’s third coming, despite the missing socio-political fulcrum is as breathless and enthralling if not more.

Omar Sy reprises his role as Assane Diop, the impoverished but immaculately cultured leading man of the series that made him a global star. Diop, in hiding after the events of the second season, finds himself drawn towards his wife Claire (Ludivine Sagnier) and son Raoul, played with amicable tenderness by Etan Simon. Diop’s rise to the status of a national hero, a rebellious vanguard against the vanity of the upper 1 percent, has made Claire and Raoul targets of both attention and suspicion. Though that national-icon status is teased in the season’s first episode, it isn’t quite followed up by hysteria that would otherwise politicize the untiring rise of a one-man cult. The question of what this thief will eventually become as a political symbol, is sidestepped for conquests more familial in design.

While the first two seasons dealt with Diop’s quest to avenge his late father’s blotted history, the third studiously revisits his fractious relationship with his mother. Diop must disappear to rediscover a normal life, and yet his exploits mark him as public figure of interest. This interest accrues both misery and malice as he sets out to fight not one battle, but many. In between, we are also offered flashbacks of his life as a vagrant of the street where he falls into the menacing tutelage of a boxing coach. A friend from childhood becomes an echo of the deceptions he must concoct as a situational consequence. He is after all, ultimately, human.

For someone so slick, full of smarts and miles ahead of everyone else, it is a bit of mystery how easily Sy’s titular character rolls himself into trouble. But what makes this series so likeable is the fact that it trusts its tricks to paint over the wart of logical instability. Every episode, therefore, offers a bit of a caper, with the thrill of following the action before being suddenly acquainted with the trick that was hiding up the sleeve all along. Some of these you can guess, some will blindside you through their sheer audacity. In one sequence Diop pulls off a quick getaway by painting a car in a different colour. It’s numbingly uncomplicated but affecting. The object of contention in this third season is the jewel titled ‘Black Pearl’ but it’s the bits in between, where Sy effortlessly makes gun-wielding men look dumb and dopey, that continues to endear.

Though his accomplice Benjamin, played flawlessly by Antoine Gouy, and the somewhat smitten police officer on his trail, Guedira (Soufiane Guerrab), offer ample performative support, it is really Sy’s soft, gracious turn, which despite the action that marshals a large part of the show’s language, that captivates. Diop is clever without being cocky, and suave without being presumptively bullish. He sports a smile and not a smirk, which makes it possible for him to wear ridiculous disguises and seamlessly step into working-class jobs for the sake of a job. Of course, for a show patterned around narrative loops and stark visual cuts, not everything offered as an ingenious twist feels like one. There is still that insatiable quality to the franchise that a thief’s endless catalogue of methods this show has come to embody.

Netflix’s Lupin has become a global success, a show so bedazzling yet simple, it practically feels like reality TV with the soul of a literary marathon. It balances its high-octane bits with personal histories that cut across time, space and class without being bogged down by the need to pander to sentiment or sensationalism. The fact that Lupin still believes in pulling off street-smart parlour tricks as opposed to imperiously scaled global deceits, is part of the charm that makes this native show truly global. In Sy, it probably has the perfect lead, a man who can possibly absorb all the commotion around him to then stitch the elegant little hymn that thievery can look like in cinema. He's one of streaming’s finest anti-heroes, and for the sake of everything overpriced and bourgeois, may he keep going.