The Sticky serves up sweet, gooey Canadian goodness

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This article was published 07/12/2024 (662 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Sticky, a limited series now streaming on Prime Video, is a Canadian-themed heist story, which is great. Go CanCon.

It’s about a maple syrup heist, though, which is possibly pouring on the Canadian content a little thick. This six-episode show is quick, quirky and packed with good performances, but it really taps into — syrup joke! — the tropes of Canadiana. Watching The Sticky, one feels Canuck crime sprees might be confined to hijacking truckloads of plaid flannel shirts, breaking into hockey-stick factories and kidnapping moose.

The Sticky is set in Quebec but created by two Americans, Brian Donovan and Ed Herro, and it’s pitched at both Canadian and American audiences. It features a cross-border cast, including Jutra award-winning Quebec actor Guillaume Cyr and Hollywood’s Jamie Lee Curtis.

At the series’ gala première in Los Angeles, “guests were transported into a Canadian forest, escaping into a world of woodland trees, crackling fireplaces, snow-covered floors, and odes to syrup woven into the decor, libations and culinary creations,” according to a press release.

This sounds like a sweetened-up, snow-globe fantasy version of Canada, but the show was actually inspired by a real event, the months-long theft, over 2011 and 2012, of more than $18-million worth of maple syrup from the Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec (PPAQ), which controls more than 75 per cent of the global maple syrup supply.

While The Sticky uses that crime as a jumping-off point, it also admits, in an appealingly frank way, that it’s just making things up. Each 30-minute episode begins with the written disclaimer: “This is absolutely not the true story of The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.”

A bit like Fargo in its comic fictionalization of cold-weather criming, the story starts with the troubles of Ruth Landry, played with a deft mixture of dark humour and real poignance by “Character Actress Margo Martindale,” as they say on BoJack Horseman.

Ruth is running the family maple syrup operation on her own — her husband is in a coma after falling from a tree — but she’s close to being shut down by the syrup association over a paperwork technicality. (In real life, there are divided opinions on the PPAQ — some see it as a cartel, some see it as a co-op – but this dramatized version, with a different name, is definitely run by a tinpot tyrant.)

Backed into a corner, Ruth conspires with sweetly bumbling security guard Remy Bouchard (Cyr) and Mike Byrne (Canadian Chris Diamantopoulos), a low-level Boston mobster, to rob the association’s reserve of brown gold.

The Sticky does pretty well in evoking the atmosphere of rural traplines and sugar shacks and smalltown, family-run businesses. There’s a Canadian need for apologizing, even in the middle of a criminal conspiracy, and a key plot point rests on fur mittens.

(The series does struggle with language issues. There are moments of characters casually speaking French, with subtitles, in an attempt at local colour. Unfortunately, the creators seem to feel too many subtitles are risky, and we have a lot of other scenes in which two francophones are inexplicably speaking English to each other.)

Running underneath the Great White North trappings of conifers and parkas, though, there’s a much more important Canadian characteristic, captured in the story’s soft spot for underdogs and screwups.

Most heist films function as competence porn, focusing on precision planning and highly skilled specialists. There are detailed blueprints and synchronized watches, meticulously timed explosions and elaborate getaway routes.

The Sticky takes an adorably incompetent and loser-centric approach to crime. Remy, who’s turning 40 but still living with his doting dad, is ridiculed and dismissed at work. Mike is trying to project Tarantino-type slickness up here in the sticks, but we soon realize he’s also ignored by his Boston boss. Taken together, Ruth, Remy and Mike are more like the Three Stooges than Ocean’s Eleven.

As the hapless trio fumbles into multiple felonies, The Sticky champions the overlooked and the undervalued. Our would-be maple syrup thieves aren’t George Clooney looking suave in a tux. They’re invisible, Ruth suggests, dismissed and derided, and that’s why they might just get away with it.

Now that attitude feels as authentically Canadian as, well, maple syrup.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca