Lupin is a rare Netflix series that gets better with each season, as Omar Sy's titular thief steals hearts and rare valuables.

Lupin: Part 4 is on Netflix now. It’s been three years since Lupin’s last season — a less memorable, less focused entry — so you’d be forgiven for forgetting much of what transpired. The show’s fourth part features an extended recap narrated by the title character before kicking off in earnest, at which point it hits the “soft reboot” button, both narratively and stylistically. Its biggest change is a welcome one: it leans unapologetically into the soap opera underpinnings which have always made it tick. The result is a brisk eight episodes that, despite wheel-spinning near the season’s end, eventually find their way to the kind of ludicrous melodrama that makes the French heist series such a turn-your-brain-off delight. Part 3 ended with a major cliffhanger, as gentleman thief Assane Diop (Omar Sy) — a devotee of Maurice Leblanc’s fictitious fraudster Arsène Lupin — found himself in prison, in a cell adjacent to his long time, opulent enemy Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre). How does the new season resolve this tension? Well, it doesn’t. Which is to say, it treats the whole thing like a gag in order for the show to move forward into unexpected territory. Four years have passed, and in that time, Assane has willingly remained behind bars — except for a brief escape where he bamboozled Pellegrini all the way into a shipping container bound for a Malaysian prison. Now on the verge of release for good behavior, it finally seems like Assane has turned over a new leaf. That is, until a slickly-executed pair of simultaneous heists, in his signature style, make the police suspicious, forcing him to go rogue in order to prove his innocence. During Assane’s prison stint, his teenage son Raoul (now played by newcomer Théo Christine) has grown into a frustrated young adult in want of an absent father. Once a mere plot device and kidnapping victim, Raoul now becomes the series’ unexpected heart and soul, though the narrative, and Assane, keep shoving him to the side until those frustrations reach a boiling point. A winding conspiracy takes precedence, involving a copycat swindler and twists and turns ripped right from a daytime soap opera — a secret lineage, sudden deaths, equally sudden resurrections, and so on — forcing Lupin to unexpectedly turn to former foes for new partnerships in search of a secret treasure. All the while, his police frenemy Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab), a fellow Leblanc enthusiast, remains on his tail, but is less willing to offer him the benefit of doubt when his partner Sofia Belkacem (Shirine Boutella) is gravely injured.It's a brisk eight episodes that, despite wheel-spinning near season’s end, eventually find their way to the kind of ludicrous melodrama that makes the series such a turn-your-brain-off delight. Complicating matters further is the fact that, in Assane’s absence, his best friend and co-conman Benjamin (Antoine Gouy) has fallen for his ex-wife and Raoul’s mother, Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), adding yet another layer to the sprawling flashbacks of the various characters as teens and young adults. Was this pairing always in the cards? Of course not, but the fourth season also goes a long way towards re-writing the show’s basic DNA. These flashbacks involve both interpersonal drama and a surprising amount of setup for the contemporary conspiracies, as though the central plot of this season — involving a secret society with some icky blood-purity leanings, playing into the show’s modern, pluralistic re-imagining of Leblanc’s Lupin — had been decades in the making. Like Assane himself, the show is a bullshit artist of the highest caliber; it works to convince you that every twisting screw is part of some intricately devised puzzle dating back to its 2021 debut, when it’s all clearly been designed on-the-fly. And yet, that design yields some clockwork thrills from time to time, between Assane’s continued weaponization of racial prejudice to pull off his galaxy-brained heists (one scheme in particular involves a flashmob of re-enactors dressed as an oft-forgotten Black French general) and the style with which the series presents each deceit. The editing is more judicious this time. To reveal how a given ploy was pulled off, it relies less on unseen angles and elements when episodes re-visit existing scenes, and more on parts of the image you might’ve missed in the first place. The season’s broader themes of family allow Lupin to become a particularly silly bit of business akin to the later Fast & Furious films. Assane becomes increasingly torn between making up for lost time with Raoul and tracking down lost jewels with a newly-formed family of thieves who start out the season at odds. Among these is a mixed-race character named Adèle Kapoor (Laïka Blanc-Francard) who, in addition to expanding the show’s quickfire (if malformed) invocations of racism in modern France, becomes the center of a tech-infused update to the series with her skills as a hacker in the age of A.I. deepfakes. The less said about her backstory beforehand, the better, but that she’s on par with Assane as a Leblanc-inspired burglar and gives him a much-needed rival and dramatic counterweight. The show’s new directions aren’t necessarily original — here you’ll find familiar gadgets, scenes and dynamics straight out of everything from Bond, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible to the network procedural White Collar — but Lupin’s fourth part sublimates all these influences into something cheekily enjoyable. It rides a fine line between heightened, crisscrossing nonsense plots and intensified character-centric schmaltz, but when it counts the most, it manages to find just the right balance between the two, before leaving off in perhaps the most unexpected place this series could go. If there is a fifth season (and there really should be), the dilemmas facing Assane will probably make for damn good television, given the various pieces Part 4 moves gradually into place.

Netflix's hit French crime thriller Lupin returns after a three-year wait, with Omar Sy back as the cunning gentleman thief Assane Diop.

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Omar Sy discusses Lupin Season 4, Assane Diop's life in prison, facing a copycat thief, the importance of family in the story and a possible Season 5.

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Omar Sy revient en tant que maître voleur Assane Diop et doit faire face à un imitateur : voici ce que les fans doivent savoir sur les nouveaux épisodes du succès Netflix « Lupin », désormais disponibles.