SERIES REVIEW by Richard Roeper
"THE SERPENT" Three stars
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The eight-episode Netflix docudrama "The Serpent" just might hold the all-time record for number of flashbacks and flash-forwards in a limited series, as we continually zip a couple of years ahead or a few months back along the mid-1970s timeline -- a frustrating and utterly unnecessary and wildly overused device that consistently works against an otherwise fascinating, exotic, lurid period-piece true-crime story about a suave, identity-switching serial killer who makes Tom Ripley seem like an amateur.
Serpentine (I see what you did there) storyline concerns aside, "The Serpent" is an effectively unsettling, fictionalized telling of the incredible and horrific series of kidnappings and murders orchestrated by one Charles Sobhraj, played to suave and oily perfection by Tahar Rahim, the brilliant French actor last seen in "The Mauritanian." (For most of the story, Sobhraj operates under the alias of Alain Gautier, so we'll refer to him as Alain moving forward.) The story opens in Bangkok, 1975, with Alain clearly the Man as he glides around a poolside party at an apartment building filled with bohemian hippie types, most of them from Western Europe or America -- and all of them looking to let their freak flags fly and extend the 1960s vibe as far as possible.