Tulsa King Review: A Vanity Project That Plays to Its Star’s Charms

An icon of the action movie genre for much of his career, Sylvester Stallone makes his first foray into serial television with Taylor Sheridan and Terence Winter’s Tulsa King. “There’s nothing left for you here, we can’t just rewind the clock,” Dwight Manfredi (Stallone) is told upon stepping out of prison after 25 years. He did his time and kept his mouth shut to protect his family only to find out that the kids have taken over. With no use for him in New York, the family sends him to set up an operation of his own in Tulsa, where—with his sharp suits, slick shades, and wise-guy swagger—he sticks out like a gold pinky ring.

Every bit the alpha, man-of-action archetype that you’d expect to find striding through the Sheridan-verse, Dwight quickly sets about finding a way to grow an empire out of the arid Oklahoma desert soil. He hops into a taxi at the airport and quickly hires the young cabbie (Jay Will) as his personal driver before strolling through the doors of the first business that they pass by—a weed dispensary ran by a disaffected hippy named Bodhi (Martin Starr)—and strolls back out five minutes later with a pocket full of “protection money.” He hasn’t even checked into his hotel yet and he’s already started Tulsa’s very first mob racket.

It all goes surprisingly smoothly, with the threat of an unarmed septuagenarian apparently enough to convince Bodhi to accept this new arrangement rather than, say, tell the police that a crazy old man beat up his security guard, took his money, and promised to come back next week. But while it might not seem entirely feasible, the ease with which Dwight lays the foundation for his criminal enterprise is a clear indication of what kind of series Tulsa King wants to be. This isn’t a hard look at the logistics of mafia operations, from the venomous masculinity that drives them to the moral abyss at their center. Rather, the point is to allow us to watch Stallone bend the world to his whims with a few wisecracks and a mean left hook.

That’s because Tulsa King is, first and foremost, a vanity project for its leading man that does everything possible to make him easy to root for. This fish-out-of-water dramedy’s plot is a vehicle that acts like Dwight’s own newly purchased Lincoln Navigator, whisking him from one justified target to another so that we can delight in him knocking them down. At one point he gets to stand up for his young driver when he’s discriminated against by a racist car salesman and at another protects the members of a hen party from sexual harassment.

Both of these situations, as it turns out, can be solved with a burst of fisticuffs, allowing Dwight to project power and decency in equal, moderately cartoonish amounts. Sure, he’s violently intimidating civilians into handing over their hard-earned cash, but he does it with a smile. It’s certainly a part that, like the series itself, has clearly been tailor-made for Stallone, namely for the way that it all plays to his particular brand of mealy-mouthed charisma.

Sheridan’s acolytes are unlikely to find in Tulsa King much of the soulful masculinity that characterises his other work, and it’s a long way from the morally murky drama of Winter’s finest gangster tales like Boardwalk Empire. It also doesn’t have anywhere near the humble, world-wearied power of Stallone’s work in the Creed films, but with his slick one-liners and gruff deadpan, he manages to carry the entire series on the back of his imposing frame.