Binge-r #187: Reprisal + The Last Dance
The Walking Dead: Abigail Spencer (Doris) in Reprisal
REPRISAL S1
Streaming Service: SBS on Demand
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
“I come from bad blood and dark days,” announces Doris (Abigail Spencer), towards the end of this pulpy neo noir’s first episode, and amidst the stylised menace and gloriously lurid production design, Reprisal spares no effort to affirm the character’s melancholy boast. Created by Josh Corbin (StartUp), this American series is a fantasia lifted from the daydreams of David Lynch and the nightmares of Elmore Leonard. It begins as a crime family turns on their own, with a young woman – her face lit by the red taillights of a pick-up in a killing field – being chained up and dragged behind the vehicle. Somehow she survives, and a decade later lives as the coiled, coiffed, and out for revenge Doris, who from her first stand-off with a Detroit gangster has a defiance borne of being left for dead.
The narrative is peppered with eye candy shaped by writerly hubris – it’s Sons of Anarchy remade as high genre art. The setting mixes flip phones, 1960s hot-rods, and gnarly gangs who exist in a post-racial fraternity, with some very weird news bulletins and alternate history references. There’s a surplus of neon-lit burlesque and retro businesses, as the story flips between Doris in Detroit, where she has issues with her dying husband’s family to iron out, and somewhere in the south where the gang that houses her attackers, the Banished Brawlers, has its extensive operations. The dominating machismo and female revenge fever are two halves of an equation that don’t always add up, as you can need more from these characters than their assaults on each other.
There are more doors to the plot than just Doris, who slowly assembles a team to infiltrate her former home, with a young recruit to a Brawlers offshoot, Ethan (Mena Massoud, a long way from Disney’s Aladdin remake), earning his bones with Matty (Rhys Wakefield), an embittered debt collector whose harlequin mask-like face is perfect for this florid concoction. All of this has been done before – think Robert Rodriguez circa From Dusk Till Dawn – and it’s done well enough here to satisfy anyone whose taste runs to diner shootings and surly stand-offs. Spencer is an exceptional femme fatale, but I still needed a little more. Without lasting contrast, the style in Reprisal starts to sour.
Bulls on Parade: Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan in The Last Dance
THE LAST DANCE (Netflix, all 10 episodes now streaming): The setting is the tumultuous final 1998 season of Michael Jordan’s dominant Chicago Bulls basketball team, but you don’t have to be a fan of hoops, or any sport for that matter, to be caught up in this juicy ESPN documentary about the game’s greatest player and the burden his genius created on and off the court. With an incredible supporting cast, including the underpaid Scottie Pippen, the best player on any other team, and Jerry Krause, the pugnacious general manager the two greats feuded with, the first two episodes of Jason Hehir’s 10-part documentary are rich in pithy anecdotes, unvarnished takes, and acute archival demonstrations of Jordan’s complexity and competitiveness. On the court he defied gravity, but off it he bent reason his way – watching the normally circumspect icon address his contradictions and situation, matched by anthropological detail and social history, is fascinating viewing.
>> Further Reading: One of the best shows on Foxtel this year is HBO’s The Plot Against America, an alternate history adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel about a 1940s America veering towards fascism. Adapted by the crew from The Wire, it’s vital, terrifying, and timely. I reviewed it for The Monthly [full story here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Aaron Sorkin directs an Aaron Sorkin script in the very Aaron Sorkin Molly’s Game (2017, 140 minutes), with Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba as an indicted poker entrepreneur and her defence attorney; Hannibal (2001, 132 minutes) was an overblown and unnecessary sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, with Julianne Moore replacing Jodie Foster alongside Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman.
New on SBS on Demand: Starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and the exceptionally creepy Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, 116 minutes) is the culmination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ run of drily bleak black comedies about people absent from their own humanity; Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987, 103 minutes) is a classic and if you haven’t seen it you must watch it immediately.
New on Stan: Wes Craven’s Red Eye (2005, 86 minutes) remains a cracking and deeply personal thriller, with Rachel McAdams as the young woman who finds Cillian Murphy sitting next to her on a plane flight; Shaft (2000, 100 minutes) is overly slick and self-satisfied, but Samuel L Jackson, Christian Bale and Jeffrey Wright deliver juicy archetypes.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for an introduction to Netflix’s sharp meta-comedy critique Black AF and the melancholy Amazon sci-fi series Tales From the Loop.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 230 series reviewed here, 140 movies reviewed here, and 33 lists compiled here.
