TV Series Overview: Mad Dogs

*Contains spoilers*

So today, after a TV journey that's lasted a couple of years, I finally finished watching the British TV series Mad Dogs.

My feelings have flickered between real interest and irritated boredom over the course of the series, and the ending itself was so disjointed and bizarre as to really highlight exactly where the script was weak along the way.

For the uninitiated, the show follows four English middle-aged friends: Baxter (John Simm), Quinn (Philip Glenister), Woody (Max Beesley) and Rick (Marc Warren). Having reached the mid-point of their lives they have very little to show for it.

All of them exist in a state of disillusionment at the start of the series, whether it be with erstwhile partners, dull jobs or kids they've missed growing up...and so they agree to take a holiday trip out to Majorca to meet their old friend Alvo (Ben Chaplin). Alvo is rich beyond the wildest dreams of the other four, and they quickly end up embroiled in dangerous business after he is murdered in Season 1.

Season 2 and 3 then focuses on the after-effects of this disaster, and how the four hope to extricate themselves. Season 4 deals with the inevitable consequences of all that came before.

Now, all four actors are pretty much heavyweights of British drama, so you'd expect the script to pull the big punches too. The actors certainly play the characters very convincingly: but disappointingly, Cris Cole's writing seems to go nowhere over the course of the four seasons.

"Going nowhere": it's a prominent theme of the series. In every season, oddly melancholy and sinister billboards can be spotted in the background in some scenes showing a sad woman in makeup, or a creepy demonic face, prefaced with the slogans "road to nowhere" or "going nowhere" in foreign languages.

An example of one of the sinister billboards

It's a clever bit of foreshadowing that hints at the ultimate fates of the characters, but at the same time as the series drags on for four seasons without any real character development it becomes hard to see if the characters' lack of self-awareness is intentional or an oversight of bad writing.

Both in the first and last series the characters bicker with each other over stupid things. They get into a major fight in practically every series. And despite being offered the chance to leave behind all the bad things that happened to them, they repeatedly go back for more.

This isn't so much of a dealbreaker when you consider that it's likely that Cole intended for the narrative to feel like it's stuck on a loop: the show attempts to go for that Shakespearian tragedy feel of characters that are painfully unsure of themselves or even how to interact with their life-long friends. Characters who can't be grateful for what they have, and who always want the easy way out rather than facing up to fixing their lives.

However, other choices in the finale and from the halfway point of the third Season on feel very lazy and generic, almost as though the series was cut short.

There are several big plot strands in the last few episodes that are introduced and then dropped with no explanation, which I found highly irritating:

- Rick at one point finds a glass eye in a toilet seemingly at random: the object later prompts him to change his mind and risk his life when he could otherwise remain safe. No explanation is given for what the object might represent, or why he came to find it in the first place.

- The *third* CIA agent in the story seems amazingly incompetent, even given that Season 3's Lazaro was an absolute nutjob. Cole seems to have written her as an obligatory "zany" character, but she just comes across as really unprofessional and irritating. She then gets killed in a really stupid way, too, and we're expected to believe that a thirty-year veteran of the CIA would just turn up at random to a house siege and not even be prepared for a violent confrontation: ridiculous.

- Quinn's friend at the bar, the "connected" bald guy he shares many discussions with in Season 3, doesn't do anything. He does literally nothing over the course of the series except provide an ear for Quinn to talk into. I kept thinking he would turn up later and help the group out, but no.

- Mercedes, the female soldier who saves the four in Season 3, vanishes forever at the conclusion of S3 and isn't seen again. This is despite the group looking for the CIA's files on her, and finding that she mysteriously had none. It's repeatedly hinted that she is somehow a lot more important than she seems, but this never materialises.

- The fate of Woody's girlfriend and adopted kid is never answered.

Even more unforgivably, the choices the friends make at the end of the show are absolutely insane and show no forethought at all:

- Pursued by professional killers, they make no attempt to hide, contact the police or other authorities, or even just lay low at a hotel or something. Instead they drive out to a deserted beach (!)

- Quinn owns a bar and supposedly has lots of social connections, but mentions that "You can't just call people there, they don't give out numbers." If he owns the bar, why not just call the bartender and get his friends put on the line? That he doesn't even try to do this seems ludicrous.

- Woody ineffectually fires the group's only weapon (a shotgun) at a guy about 500 metres away, until he runs completely out of ammo. WTF?

Plot Summary:

Season 1: The group goes to Alvo's villa. Alvo is murdered by a group run by Dominic (a corrupt cop, English ex-pat), Maria (a CIA agent running narco-finance operations) and an old English dude named Mackenzie who is running the drug operations. The series ends with Maria dead and the very tense scene of Dominic walking up to the villa, about to kill an unsuspecting Quinn.

Season 2: The group promptly run Dominic over in a car and escape. There's a lot of well-plotted stuff with Mackenzie, who wants his cash back. The group is eventually cornered in Morocco by a militia force funded by the UK.

Season 3: The group is held in a blacksite prison, the CIA connection is explained, eventually they are sent to South Africa with new identities and they wriggle their way out of a CIA hitlist (though it's perplexing the CIA care about them so much, since they're essentially four civvies in the wrong place at the wrong time).

Season 4: This, for me, was where it started getting stupid. The group sells Alvo's villa, gets rich, decides to move back to Cape Town for no reason and promptly the whole lot of them get executed by Dominic's gang. The ending has them plunging off a metaphorical road to Hell.

I mean, just look at those summaries: we go from a plausible crime thriller in Season 1, to the Season 4 ending in which everyone dies and goes to straight to Hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

While the doom of the group was hinted at the whole way through, I was pretty disappointed at how it happened. It seemed completely avoidable had the group actually had half a brain, but the plot demanded they died in such a fashion and so they did.

Verdict

So, should you watch Mad Dogs? I'd say yes - just be prepared to be irritated by it towards the end.

The acting's good and Seasons 1-2 have some really good moments. Season 3 has some poignant scenes and purposeful plotlines, but for me Season 4 was when the show really seemed to lose sight of where it was going.

For the record, I don't mind ambiguous endings: and the ending of Mad Dogs is very surreal and very ambiguous. It's more the fact that you can assemble such a talented cast with such an interesting concept...and then do so very little with it and leave so much unexplained.

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3/5

A show that's equal parts interesting and frustrating, and sadly descends into poorly written nonsense close to the end as it searches to be more profound than the sum of it's parts.

Breaking Bad: Quick Thoughts So Far (Season 2)

So after a good friend pointed me to Breaking Bad a while ago, I have to say it's rapidly becoming my absolute favourite TV series since...well, since anything!

1. I'm a Chemist.
2. I like intelligent crime drama.
3. I like dark comedy.
4. I love media which depicts smartly written characters who have real motivations and personalities.

Breaking Bad satisfies all four in spades, with razor sharp writing and acting that I can only describe as absolutely spot-on.

I'm way behind, only now starting on watching right through after getting the box-set for Christmas. But the show is consistently fantastic so far.

I think the most fascinating aspect of the show thus far is easily the central shift of Walt's morality. Even more than his morality, actually: his humanity itself.

Walt starts Season 1 as a character who is almost unquestionably sympathetic. He's a decent man who, through a lack of assertiveness and simple bad fortune, has essentially been screwed out of everything he could have expected from life as a successful, honest scientist.

He's felt dead for a good chunk of his whole life. He has a stressful home life with a disabled son, a wife he struggles to express his emotions to...and biggest of all, a crushing sense that his brilliant understanding of Chemistry has got him nowhere but teaching to a bunch of uninterested, obnoxious teenagers. He's frequently too nice to offend others, and submits to pressure rather than pushing to put his desires and viewpoints across.

So when he's abruptly told he's dying of lung cancer (despite having never smoked, no less), it's understandable, even if certainly not condonable, that he begins to feel deeply sickened (and envious) when he sees the idiotic local drug pushers rolling around with more money than he's ever seen.

When he realises soon after he begins cooking that he must murder Krazy-8 to save his family from retribution, we see the despair and sadness wracking him terribly with guilt as tears flow down his cheeks.

Fast forward to Season 2, Episode 10, the episode I just finished. Walt's spent several episodes manipulating Jesse with Machiavellian grace, remorselessly lying to him and showing next to no compassion when Hank confiscated the funds he required to even have somewhere to live.

At the end of the episode, he has the following confrontation with a couple of up-and-coming meth peddlers he spots at the local DIY store. Going from the "silent partner" who very much prefers to force Jesse into getting his hands dirty, we see him suddenly assert himself as a street hardman directly:

"Stay OUT of my territory." 

It's like Walt has ceased to exist in this clip, with Heisenberg taking full control. Bryan Cranston is utterly convincing with his narrow eyes and ice-cold snarl - fabulous acting. The other guy may be bigger, but just look at that dangerous look in Walt's eyes, the thinly veiled disgust on his face, and you know immediately that he's not a guy you want to fuck with. At all.

After his "blowfish" discussion with Jesse, we see that Walt's toughness isn't bluster, either. He has nothing to fear from death, already possessing a death sentence.

Walt's disgusted look is doubly ironic considering that the big bald guy and his partner could almost be a mirror showing a more physically imposing Walt and a dirtier, more meth-y Jesse. A clever casting similarity I'm sure was deliberate.

I think the most heartbreaking thing is that as Walt becomes more adept at being Heisenberg, he starts losing everything that makes him Walt. In Season 1 he was a decent man making a lame effort at being a hardcore criminal. Now, he's sliding towards being a ruthlessly efficient hardcore criminal, but losing what makes him a likable, decent human being completely in the process.

Very interesting. And very funny. And very sad.

I love this show ;)

Movie Review: Harry Brown

*May contain spoilers*

Harry Brown is a weird film. That's about the best way to describe it.

It starts out like a hard-hitting realistic drama, and then morphs about halfway through into a vengeance-fuelled killing spree that seems lifted from the pages of a comic book.

Similarly, the film flits between chillingly accurate portrayals of British 'hoods', and an apparent alternate universe Britain where total anarchy reigns.

Whether the film is in one mood or not, at any given point it is very, very dark indeed. It has an almost unique quality to be bleak from beginning to end.

Harry Brown is a reaction to increasing street crime and yob culture in Britain, but it does not offer any solutions. Perhaps that is what the film intends - there are no easy solutions. Even the main protaganist seems to become slowly consumed by the hellish things that happen in his home area throughout the film.

First of all, the film gets off to an intimidating start. Opening scenes of the film are very powerful, and had me hooked to the screen immediately. Filmed on a mobile phone, they depict a gang of hooded youths initiating a new member to their gang. They shove drugs in his mouth and force him to smoke them for an extended time, and then with the spine-chilling words "This is how we roll", someone hands him a loaded pistol.

The next scene shows the same group roaring around on mopeds from a passenger perspective. They harass pedestrians and eventually begin firing their weapons, ending with the 'accidental' murder of a woman walking her young son in the park.

As they flee the scene, they crash violently into a truck at a junction. Fade to black.

Wow. The filmography during these first scenes is gritty, frenzied and pretty disturbing in itself, which is quite an accomplishment as usually I moan about such camerawork making me nauseous.

From there on we meet Harry Brown (who is in bed listening to news of the killing on the radio. Pretty neat linking trick there). Played by Michael Caine (an actor who varies very much in his work, but he's definitely solid here), Brown is an ageing ex-Marine previously posted in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles.

Caine conveys the loneliness of Brown's life wonderfully. Brown goes through a morning routine of sitting at his kitchen table, silently drinking tea, eating his breakfast, and then visiting his comatose elderly wife at the hospital.

In the evenings, he plays chess with a friend named Leonard (David Bradley, who you will immediately recognise as Filch from the Harry Potter films), the only person who seems to be there for him.

In between these activites, the estate he lives on is constantly plagued by violent, replusive young criminals who care nothing about the police or the law. Leonard in particular is constantly victimised.

It doesn't take long for things to quickly spiral downwards, and at around halfway into the film a broken Brown tools himself up and warms up the old military training.

Sean Harris puts in a notable performance as a drug-addled pimp-slash-gun dealer. His husky, hoarse voice and absolute lack of morals make him one of the most menacing and watchable characters to appear (however briefly) in the film.

The "twist" at the end of the film was not to my liking (it felt a little like it was added on for the sake of it) and the film steadily gets more ludicrous as it progresses.

My biggest issue, strangely enough, is with Harry's very first killing. The police don't realise he's the vigilante until right at the end, but I saw a glaring error immediately. Harry gets ambushed by a knife-wielding mugger, and when the guy goes to stab him, he instinctively turns the knife back on him without thinking, stabbing him in the heart.

The guy dies and Harry shuffles off home, destroying his clothes and wiping up the blood in a shock.

However, surely his prints would be all over the knife? Game over. Except not in movies :\

Final Word:


The villains (aside from Harris anyway) are sadly one dimensional. They spout the foulest language imaginable and do some very repulsive things.

The scenes in which the villains work best is in those in which Harry simply observes them from a distance harrassing and terrorising others- behaviour which is carried off with horrifying authenticity.

Intense verbal abuse of a female police officer was perhaps the most disturbing thing in the film, coupled with sexual abuse of a gang member by a drug dealer. Both were pretty shocking, though the second scene felt more exploitative, as if it had been included purely to shock.

The movie is also pretty violent, and there are several rather nasty uses of gore throughout. Overall I'd say the swearing is definitely the worst thing though. Expect to hear the "mother of all swears" multiple times.

My 'favourite' scene was probably when Harry confides in a dying criminal one of his most upsetting memories of the Troubles, that he never told to anyone else before, not even Leonard or his wife. A member of his unit was shot in a similar way to the criminal, and Harry recalls that they couldn't call in a medic to help him, and instead watched him die.

After Harry has finished speaking, there's a very short but poignant moment before Harry finishes him off  where the weakened scumbag seems almost to finally realise what a wretched human being he's been...but far, far too late.

Similarly, that little window gives a perfect insight into just how much Harry has become like those he crusades against with his use of extreme violence - and there definitely lies the most interesting part of the film.


3/5


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