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Failing to see the wood fro the trees?
The Guardian gave this five stars. They headlined series two as “even more spellbinding than the original masterpiece”.
I disagree.
Whilst there were moments, in particular the awkward dialogues between Ian St Clair (played by David Morrisey) and Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) in which the script, full of hesitations and unfinished sentences and non-sequiturs, was as beautifully written as anything I’ve seen on television, the basic premise of the sequel seemed to be: take the Peaky Blinders route and make it more violent. Instead of a rogue outlaw in the forest and a murder mystery, we had a vendetta between two crime families. Cue shootings. Same old, same old. It felt as if James Graham the writer didn’t know what else to do.
There were only two mysteries. Firstly, why on earth did Ryan Bottomley (Oliver Huntingdon) shoot Nicky Branson (Sam Buchanan) in the first place? Perhaps the idea was to show that violence can rise from nothing but stupidity; the attempted murder of the sheriff had a similarly dramatically weak motive. But the principal question was why were the Sparrows heroes? This was a family who dealt in drugs. The motivation for Daphne substituting her daughter for her son Ronan when accompanying the Bransons on a revenge murder attempt is because Ronan has, so far, been kept away from all the family’s criminal activities (so has the daughter but let that inconsistency pass). The implication is that Daphne and her husband and elder son are steeped in wickedness. And yet they are presented throughout as the heroes which seems to me an interesting moral stance. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that art needs to always have the triumph of the good but when there are characters who are dodgy there should be sufficient exploration of this so that the audience realise that the heroes are, at the very least, seriously flawed.
The sub-plot about the businessman trying to build a new mine felt like padding. All of the stuff about the sheriff felt like padding.
Time and again, the sequel chose spectacle over subtlety. Why on earth did the policeman who had finally discovered which of his colleagues was the mole take this younger man out to an isolated spot in the woods before arresting him? To give the man a chance of escaping? Or killing him? I mean, it was bonkers. Do it in the middle of the cop shop where you have backup. But drama triumphed over plausibility.
The acting was almost always top notch. Perhaps the most outstanding was Daphne Sparrow, played by Lorraine Ashbourne. But fundamentally all their efforts were undermined by a plot full of holes.
I disagree.
Whilst there were moments, in particular the awkward dialogues between Ian St Clair (played by David Morrisey) and Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) in which the script, full of hesitations and unfinished sentences and non-sequiturs, was as beautifully written as anything I’ve seen on television, the basic premise of the sequel seemed to be: take the Peaky Blinders route and make it more violent. Instead of a rogue outlaw in the forest and a murder mystery, we had a vendetta between two crime families. Cue shootings. Same old, same old. It felt as if James Graham the writer didn’t know what else to do.
There were only two mysteries. Firstly, why on earth did Ryan Bottomley (Oliver Huntingdon) shoot Nicky Branson (Sam Buchanan) in the first place? Perhaps the idea was to show that violence can rise from nothing but stupidity; the attempted murder of the sheriff had a similarly dramatically weak motive. But the principal question was why were the Sparrows heroes? This was a family who dealt in drugs. The motivation for Daphne substituting her daughter for her son Ronan when accompanying the Bransons on a revenge murder attempt is because Ronan has, so far, been kept away from all the family’s criminal activities (so has the daughter but let that inconsistency pass). The implication is that Daphne and her husband and elder son are steeped in wickedness. And yet they are presented throughout as the heroes which seems to me an interesting moral stance. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that art needs to always have the triumph of the good but when there are characters who are dodgy there should be sufficient exploration of this so that the audience realise that the heroes are, at the very least, seriously flawed.
The sub-plot about the businessman trying to build a new mine felt like padding. All of the stuff about the sheriff felt like padding.
Time and again, the sequel chose spectacle over subtlety. Why on earth did the policeman who had finally discovered which of his colleagues was the mole take this younger man out to an isolated spot in the woods before arresting him? To give the man a chance of escaping? Or killing him? I mean, it was bonkers. Do it in the middle of the cop shop where you have backup. But drama triumphed over plausibility.
The acting was almost always top notch. Perhaps the most outstanding was Daphne Sparrow, played by Lorraine Ashbourne. But fundamentally all their efforts were undermined by a plot full of holes.
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