'Kaleidoscope' review: Colorful heist drama

WHAT IT'S ABOUT "Kaleidoscope" has earned its share of headlines in the past couple weeks as the Netflix miniseries with color-coded episodes to be watched in an order that the streaming service claims to randomly assign to each viewer, with the exception of the brief introduction and the finale.

Were it not for the dependable star presence of Giancarlo Esposito, fresh off his "Better Call Saul" run, one would reasonably approach the eight-episode show with the assumption that it's mostly about the gimmick.

So it's a great surprise to find that "Kaleidoscope," created by novelist and screenwriter Eric Garcia ("Matchstick Men"), is an exceptionally entertaining heist drama, with each episode functioning as a stand-alone piece of storytelling and a key facet of the overall picture.

Esposito plays Leo Pap, an expert thief assembling a team to go after what might be the most secure vault in the United States: the underground lair run by Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell) and his SLS security company, where $7 billion in bearer bonds belonging to a trio of the world's most powerful bankers has been stored.

Pap's crew includes Ava (Paz Vega), a lawyer and weapons expert; his onetime cellmate Stan Loomis (Peter Mark Kendall), an expert smuggler; explosives specialist Judy Goodwin (Rosaline Elbay); and her loose cannon husband Bob (Jai Courtney), the designated safecracker, among others.

Betrayals, jealousy, complicated histories and a looming hurricane bearing down on New York City only complicate things.

MY SAY Even though it's inspired by a real-life incident during Superstorm Sandy, where flooding nearly destroyed billions of bearer bonds in lower Manhattan, "Kaleidoscope" comfortably lands in "Ocean's Eleven" territory.

All the heist subgenre tropes are there, from the initial gathering of the crew of criminals through the elaborate planning of the crime, the practice run in Manhattan's Diamond District and the eventual caper itself.

But the story is told with aplomb, as the fractured chronology shifts the focus toward the characters and their stories rather than the particulars of the plot.

The conventional beats get scrambled, even as "Kaleidoscope" follows them closely in a linear sense. The miniseries generates its suspense through the relationships and how they unfold more than anything. 

The motivations driving Leo and the rest of his team gradually reveal themselves, adding a great deal of urgency to how things play out, far beyond the question of who gets the money, if anyone does, and what they do with it.

It's rich territory for Esposito, who shakes free of the meticulous demeanor and bottled-up rage of "Saul's" Gustavo Fring for a looser and more limber character, a man who is capable of plotting one of the most complicated heists in history while having little control over everything else in his life.

Netflix has a good reason to double down on productions like this one and other efforts (trivia games, choose-your-own adventure specials, etc.) that tweak the usual streaming formula to draw eyeballs in an unbelievably cluttered market. But however the miniseries is being marketed, good storytelling is good storytelling, and "Kaleidoscope" has an abundance of it.

BOTTOM LINE No matter the episode order, "Kaleidoscope" is a lot of fun.