Encore, Mes Amis! Lupin Is Back.

Personal confession: I love Lupin. The Netflix thriller about a gentleman thief in modern-day France is ferocious, fine, frantic, frenetic — un délice.

When last we saw Omar Sy’s Assane Diop back in January’s episodes, his young son had been kidnapped in a rustic, beachside town, snatched by a hired killer in the employ of Diop’s nemesis, the dastardly Hubert Pelligrini.

Pelligrini, as you might gather, even if you’ve not seen a single minute of Lupin, is not a swell guy, even though he has money and goes out of his way to lay on the charm. He framed Diop for the theft of priceless possessions that Pelligrini embezzled, then flipped in an insurance scam. Diop, a teenager at the time, went to prison for the crime.

And now, like some burly, present-day hero out of a Victor Hugo classic — The Count of Monte Cristo, set in modern-day Paris, Diop is back in the world and bent on revenge, no matter the cost to himself.

Lupin bowed in January with a quintet of episodes titled Dans L’Ombre D’Arsène — In the Shadow of Arsène — in which we learned that Diop, an avid reader from childhood, is inspired by the exploits of Arsène Lupin, a fictional character created by the real-life novelist Maurice Leblanc in a series of books in the early 1900s.

Leblanc, a national hero in France — though less well-known here — created his Lupin as the French version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

This is not the first time Lupin has been adapted for TV and film, but it may be the best. Omar Sy is fine in the part, a black man navigating what is still largely a white man’s world, a turn on a familiar trope that would have seemed inconceivable when Leblanc published his classic The Arrest of Arsène Lupin in 1905.

Lupin, both in Leblanc’s version and the Netflix reimagining, admittedly robs his victims of their belongings, but he refuses to give in to violence — unless pushed to it, as he is here, in the first of the new episodes — and he only steals from those who stole themselves or got rich by illegal means.

Steal from the rich and give to the poor. Now where have we heard that before?

Lupin is French through and through, but Netflix gives you the option of watching with subtitles or in an English dubbed version. Personally I find subtitles better, but that may just be me. Sy — and not just Sy but the other actors as well — are really, really good, and it just makes sense to hear them in their own voices, even if you might not be familiar with the language. Sy is a ferocious presence here, full of charm, wit and charisma, not unlike what I imagine Idris Elba might be if he's the next James Bond.

Sy, an established actor and a media star in his native France — he was born in Île-de-France, near Versailles — approached Netflix himself, and told them he wanted to play a part in an action show. Lupin was a natural fit, une coupe naturelle.

Sy changed elements of Lupin’s character — the name change to Assane Diop, for one — to better reflect his own personality and joie de vivre.

There are deeper reasons for why Lupin works for me, though, that go beyond a great actor and solid source material. The writer, and the only English presence behind the camera, is George Kay, who co-created and wrote Netflix’s Criminal series and wrote early episodes of the cult fave Killing Eve, alongside Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Kay has said adapting Lupin to a modern-day setting with a leading man of the times would be more appealing to viewers raised on Breaking Bad and Mr. Robot rather than the classics of old.

Hey, it works too! It’s not just a solid story, with a character who is much loved and who people can quickly relate to. The 2021 Lupin tackles important social themes such as parenthood, race, class prejudice, a love for reading passed on from parent to child, and a thirst for justice in a world where the rich seem to get away with everything and the rest of us are just there for their petty amusement.

Lupin is fresh, daring and impertinent. It’s a New World spin on an Old World classic, and it rocks. I love it.