TV reviewDrama This article is more than 3 years oldReviewTin Star: Liverpool review – murder and mayhem on Merseyside
This article is more than 3 years oldTim Roth and his family are hellbent on unleashing glorious revenge in the final season of the Sky Atlantic drama
After a madcap, uneven couple of seasons, Tin Star (Sky Atlantic) has made the move from Canada to Liverpool, returning to where it all began, in order to finish things off for good. In more ways than one, I suspect: this will be the final season, and given its affection for an enormously high and painful body count, it seems all but certain that the casualties will be numerous.
Jack Worth (Tim Roth) finally walked away from his old-new life in the Canadian Rockies, leaving barely a living soul behind, scattering the remaining members of his family, wife Angela and daughter Anna, in different directions, after dropping the news that he was not, in fact, Anna’s biological father. The action picks up on the family’s return to Liverpool, bringing them home for the first time in 20 years, where they plan to meet up and make their way through a long list of names who have wronged them. “We kill everyone on the list,” explains Jack, always wobbling somewhere between baffled and thrilled by the violence in front of him.
Grounding it in Liverpool has the effect of making it a bit less surreal and Fargo-ish than previous seasons. When the trio do meet again, it’s in a pub, and anyone missing the carefree days of drinking without a scotch egg for company may find the nostalgia pangs unbearable. Jack is forced to wait at the bar until Angela and Anna find him there, and over what must be many nights, we see crowds shouting at football matches, ignoring a standup, cheering a hen-do and, eventually, descending into a full-blown brawl. (Never mind the gore – when we saw happy, joyful karaoke, I almost had to look away.) To its credit, the brawl plays out as a moving backdrop to Angela’s return, and those funny little moments are a treat.
This has always been an odd series, though; gritty with a touch of the zany, before hitting you with some truly unpleasant and gruesome act of violence or cruelty, or both. The list of people on whom the Worths plan to take vengeance is long and reaches into the heart of the city’s establishment. Jack’s old-old life, as an undercover police officer, has made him many enemies, the most dangerous of which becomes more of a family issue than it might have first seemed. The death list is a clever move, because it acts as a reset, of sorts; if you missed out on the Ammonite community and the cartel and the big oil, then it is fine to see this as a self-contained thriller all of its own.
Ian Hart makes a cracking villain as Michael Ryan, a crime boss hiding under the cloak of credibility as a property developer. As soon as he unveiled his plans for dockside luxury apartments, “modern living for a modern city”, stuffed with bars, clubs, shops and maybe even a casino, I had him pegged as a baddie, before he so much as hinted at murderous tendencies. Any TV character who promises to build luxury apartments is guaranteed to be hiding some villainy behind those architectural models. While the series is occasionally daft, in a way that jars with its viciousness, Ryan is the real deal, chilling and menacing, a threat that the Worths may not be able to shoot away.
Ryan is not running the city alone. The season also brings in Tanya Moodie as the chief constable, Catherine McKenzie, whom Jack knows well enough to call Cathy. She gets one of the best exchanges of the first episode, dismissing the former undercover officer as “a dirty little secret from our prehistoric past”, and “the last of your sordid and oppressive species”. The show is theatrical and over-the-top, but it is fun and exhilarating, which means it frequently gets away with stretching plausibility. The Worths, for example, run around the streets with their guns out freely, waving them around as if they are football clackers, and nobody bats an eyelid.
There is much to enjoy in the show, even when it is at its silliest. It still looks great, whether in the crowded living room of a care home or a brightly painted, multi-coloured staircase, mid-gunfight. The Worth family make a fine trio of assassins, assessing the moral and emotional cost of killing on the beach, when Anna says that taking a life made her feel ... “Fabulous?” Jack offers. “Powerful,” suggests Angela. With parents like these, she never had much hope. Their quest for revenge looks as if it will be a thrilling one, even when they are hiding in plain sight, making threats to kill on television, or landing in a bloodied heap in the middle of a ballroom dancefloor.
Tin Star began with Jack seeking the quiet life for his family, and looks set to end in a very loud, very bright blaze of destruction.
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