HBO's Our Boys is the Slack Re-examination of an Israeli-Palestinian True-Crime Story | TV/Streaming

Even with a story like this, given all of its inherent conflicts, “Our Boys” has a frustrating slackness. Part of that feels to be because of its length—it’s a series that runs for ten 55-minute episodes, and seemingly features every minor interaction that could possibly move the plot along. But it’s also due to the visual storytelling, which feels limited to handheld camerawork and cross-cutting between different narratives, without the atmosphere gaining a proper nervousness. It’s the strange case of a narrative that might have been curated carefully with its investigative beats, but so little appears to happen in each episode that a necessary tension is lost. 

This stagnant nature strands the uniformly strong cast, who often wrestle with massive emotions in a time of personal and political strife becoming intertwined. “Our Boys” wants to get into everyone’s head, and only sometimes conveys the urgency of a parent’s pain, or the anger of someone who feels attacked, wanting to retaliate. It spends a fair amount of time with a group of young Jewish men, including the meek Avishai (Adam Gabay) and his brash leader, Yosef (Ben Melech), himself the son of a revered rabbi. It's in these long stretches, watching these men as they celebrate the Sabbath—and sneak away to break its rules—that the series wants to pull some truth from out of their conservative shells, but "Our Boys" can't quite articulate it, while the pacing suffers in the process. 

The series' intrigue appears to be held together by Shlomi Elkabetz, whose performance as the investigator at the center is calming but weighed down. His constant slouch and cool nature portrays someone methodical and yet privately imperfect, something that's often more fascinating than the muted conversational scenes he's always in. 

The biggest curiosity within “Our Boys” comes most of all from its interest in hearing out both sides, while casting judgment on no one. It bounces around between different sides and always points out their neighborhoods, and every now and then you’ll see the distinction between how someone who is Jewish or Arabic feels about the injustice at hand. Everyone has an assumption about who could have done such unspeakable things, and it's based on their biases—there’s even a surprisingly funny moment where the cops share text messages from their mothers, who have their own unflappable biases about who did it. Effectively, "Our Boys" even plants these characters within news footage, and naturally expands the scope of the story from the image of intimate conversations to massive, raucous crowd scenes, the latter provided by footage from the real events.