Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hard Broken’ On Netflix, A Lebanese Thriller Where A Murder Reveals Secrets Within A Group Of Friends

Sometimes we watch a show that’s so poorly put together, that we don’t even care about the story at hand. A new thriller from Lebanon fits this category, but it’s not like the show’s structural and storytelling faults obscure some great mystery.

HARD BROKEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An SUV speeding down a road at night. A woman in obvious pain is screaming for her husband to get her to the hospital.

The Gist: As the woman, Yasmine (Rasha Bilal), is screaming in agony to her husband Adam (Muhanad Al-Hamdi), they encounter a man lying in the road, so they stop. The man gets up and holds a gun on them. He takes Yasmine while Adam begs them to let them get to the hospital. The man shoots Yasmine twice, killing her. Adam gets grazed in the shoulder as the gunman drives away in the SUV.

The lead investigator (Rodrigue Sleiman) starts by questioning Adam and Yasmine’s best friends, Lana (Douja Hijazi), Adam’s law partner, and Youssef (Talal Jurdi), Yasmine’s partner in a medical practice. Both were at a dinner for the seemingly perfect couple’s wedding anniversary, and they give conflicting information over Yasmine’s argument with a friend of Adam’s named Saad (Elie Mitri), who came to the dinner uninvited.

The couple see to it that Adam gets home from the hospital and they stay with him, especially after he gets distressed that his mother Sherine, from whom he’s been estranged for awhile, has been watching the daughter he and Yasmine had together. For one reason or another, the girl has not found out about her mother yet; all they will tell her is that she is traveling.

Lt. Sandra Bagdadi (Sara Attalla) reports to her boss that no shell casings or anything has been found at the scene, but she has some information from the autopsy: Drugs were found in Yasmine’s stomach. When the pair go to Adam’s house to give him the news, he tells Adam that if she wasn’t shot, she would have died, anyway.

The lead investigator — notice we haven’t given his name yet, because we can’t find anywhere in the first episode where he’s identified — wants to talk to Saad, but Saad has gone into hiding… sort of. He’s staying with his parents and he has his phone off. Once he does get Saad in an interrogation room, he questions Saad about his priors, his strained relationship with Yasmine, and shows him a video where the two of them argue in the background.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hard Broken is a pulpy thriller along the lines of I Know What You Did Last Summer, albeit with a much older group of friends and much worse acting.

Our Take: There’s a lot about Hard Broken that’s tough to watch. The storytelling is disjointed and makes little sense at times. The characters are poorly defined and the acting is melodramatic at best, wooden at worst. And we can’t even get a handle on one of the main characters’ names! We’re actually not sure how or why Netflix bought or commissioned this series, given that they have acquired better shows from the Middle East in the recent past.

We usually don’t go here, but even the translation is clumsy. When Adam yells at his mother to leave his house, “Do you understand or not?” That seems like an awfully polite translation for a man who’s screaming in his mother’s face. Much of the translation is the same, as if Lebanese Arabic was fed through an AI system. It certainly doesn’t help distract us from the melodramatic reactions that everyone in the cast seems to have during even the most innocuous scenes.

A lot about the logic of the first episode doesn’t make sense. Adam and Yasmine’s daughter isn’t a baby; why lie to her and tell her that her mother is traveling, only for her to hear about her mother at school? Why is Adam driving to pick up Yasmine’s body when he seems to be distraught? Why does it seem that Youssef is more upset over Yasmine’s death than anyone else? And why is the investigator dropping hints to Adam about the drugs in Yasmine’s stomach instead of telling him right out about how he thinks it go there? There are lines of dialogue that don’t make sense, reactions that make us scratch our head, and just all sorts clunkiness during the entire first episode.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Saad is shown the video where he and Yasmine are arguing and summarily dismisses it.

Sleeper Star: Sara Attalla as Sandra Bagdadi, if only because she lets her hair down and wears a studded belt to go to a bar to tell her boss about the case.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re still wondering how someone can politely scream the words “Do you understand or not?” to someone.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Hard Broken is so poorly put-together that the merits of the story itself are secondary. That takes a lot for us to say, but we couldn’t get past how amateurish the entire production was.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.