Monster (2022)

Trademark Murphy, at once in-depth and superficial, incisive and outlandish.

Thankfully, this latest in the Monster series lacks the gruesome excesses of Dahmer. But it also feels like a muddled mix of the best and worst of Murphy’s oeuvre. It’s likely to please his legions of fans, but may leave his detractors feeling a little queasy.

In “American Sports Story,” Murphy and his collaborator Stu Zicherman seemingly try to reverse-engineer something like “The People v. O. J. Simpson” but end up with less than the sum of its parts.

I don’t think Monsters grapples with its own complicity at all, and it’s much the weaker for that lack of introspection. At least the acting is good? Bardem is terrifying in a performance that’s wildly outsized but offers enough subtlety to position his howling patriarch as both a chilling villain and as a victim himself

[Episode five] “The Hurt Man” is a definitive, unflinching perspective. It’s an engrossing 33 minutes — not always for the right reasons, but always maintaining the stark rawness of truth. It’s exactly what’s missing in the rest of “Monsters,” a true crime retelling so obsessed with the same question posed 30 years ago that it loses any perspective of its own.

The show has some intensely grabby moments, to be sure, but ultimately it plays as if Murphy has burnt himself out on true-crime lore of the late 20th century while inexplicably filibustering about it. Maybe it’s time to give the tabloid relitigation a rest.

Monsters refuses to take a definitive stance on the nature of their relationship and with regard to the brothers’ guilt, it ultimately draws the same conclusion that Dunne does: “Regardless of what happened to them, Lyle and Erik aren’t entitled to our forgiveness.” That may be true. But viewers of this series should be entitled to a more nuanced, less exploitative depiction of the relationship between these two notorious, complicated men.

It’s a competently put-together hokum made in the worst possible taste.

Despite the gripping subject matter and the outstanding performances, “‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” has no idea what it wants to be. Therefore, it just dissolves into a retelling of unspeakable abuses and gruesome crimes.

On the whole, Menendez has little consistent thought about Lyle and Erik. It is attracted to them, annoyed by them. It pants and sneers and shakes its head. Some tonal inconsistency is understandable; how else could a show capture both the ludicrousness of this story and its dire, mortal dimensions? But Brennan and Murphy push past that, into the realm of incoherence.