Sandokan

The Polished Pirate

There’s a particular fatigue that modern TV brings on. We’ve spent years wading through grim prestige dramas where every lead is broken inside and every scene is lit so dimly you end up shutting the blinds just to make out a face. I hadn’t realized how much I missed full-blooded, sunlit melodrama until I started Netflix’s new take on *Sandokan*. This thing doesn’t ease in. It swings into the room on a rope and more or less tells you to leave your irony outside.

For anyone coming in cold, Sandokan is the "Tiger of Malaysia," the 19th-century pirate hero created by Emilio Salgari. In Italy, especially if you grew up there in the 1970s, Kabir Bedi’s turn in the 1976 miniseries is basically etched into memory. The 2025 version from Davide Lantieri, Scott Rosenbaum, and Alessandro Sermoneta isn’t interested in replacing that. It takes a different route altogether, steering clear of the gritty pose of modern historical epics. What it really wants is the spirit of an Errol Flynn adventure.



The filmmaking tells you the deal right away. The sword fights aren’t chopped to pieces with shaky camerawork. When Sandokan and his Dayak rebels collide with British forces on Mompracem, the action is broad, staged, almost musical in its rhythm. And then there’s the music. The second a fight kicks off, this gloriously corny theme starts chanting the hero’s name with all the restraint of a 1960s *Batman* sound effect. You either cringe or grin. I grinned more often than not.

The real center of gravity though, or maybe the showiest ornament on the whole machine, is Can Yaman. The Turkish actor who famously traded a law career for television plays Sandokan less like a savage outlaw and more like an impossibly well-maintained romantic fantasy. That’s arguably a weakness. Even in the Borneo jungle, Yaman looks immaculately trimmed, and his shirts hang on him like he wandered over from a perfume ad. He doesn’t quite have the unruly edge you’d expect from a man living by the blade. Still, inside a series that plays like a romance novel made flesh, that sleek charisma ends up fitting surprisingly well.



Across from him, Ed Westwick plays pirate hunter Lord James Brooke, and it’s hard not to catch echoes of *Gossip Girl*. He brings that same polished sneer and aristocratic contempt, only now it’s been transplanted to 1840s colonial Asia. His villainy is buttoned-up, cold, and sharp around the edges, which makes a good counterpoint to Yaman’s open-faced heroics. Whenever Brooke is scheming against the Sultan or stalking through the British consulate, Westwick carries himself like a man whose posture alone could start a fight. In the diplomatic scenes especially, his body language does half the work.

The thing driving this eight-episode first season is, of course, romance. Sandokan’s connection with the aristocratic Lady Marianna (Alanah Bloor) is pure escapist fuel. To the show’s credit, Marianna has much more room to act here than she did in earlier versions, making her own moves alongside her Malaysian maid instead of merely sighing from balconies. *PureWow*'s Steph Maida called it "*Poldark* meets *Pirates of the Caribbean*," which feels exactly right. That’s the wavelength this series lives on.



I’m still not convinced the show’s gestures toward British colonialism carry much force. The scripts mostly use the East India Company’s power grabs as scenery for longing looks and last-minute rescues. Depending on your tolerance for pulp, that will either feel beside the point or entirely beside the point in the wrong way.

*Sandokan* has no interest in reinventing television. It wants to give you an hour of handsome heroes, sneering villains, and nonstop adventure in bright colors, without apologizing for any of it. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes a well-made cliché hits the spot exactly.