by Michael McCarthy
I finished watching the series Animal Kingdom on Netflix, which is also available on Prime. Truly excellent crime drama. (Note: this review contains very mild spoilers.) It focuses on a family, the Codys, who are career criminals. Four sons and a cousin commit crimes under the direction of the brothers’ mother, a woman who goes by the name Smurf. The series was loosely based on an Australian movie of the same name, which I plan to hunt down soon. In any case, if you like dark crime shows like Sons of Anarchy I think you’d love it. It’s not quite as dark as Sons of Anarchy but it does have the same edgy vibe.
My biggest issue with the show is that they do kill off main characters and some of them I feel like they killed off way too soon. The stars who played the two main characters that were killed off too soon reportedly wanted to leave the show, which I don’t understand because it was an excellent show. I don’t know how well it performed but there were six seasons and TNT would not have kept renewing a show if it the ratings were dismal. But I guess they didn’t promote it enough because I usually hear about good TV series and somehow I didn’t even know that this show existed until it turned up on Netflix a few weeks ago.
Ellen Barkin plays Smurf. She’s an actress I never really liked. I just never saw her in anything good. And the things I did see her in, the names of which I cannot recall, I did not think she was very good in. However, she’s truly brilliant in Animal Kingdom. Her character is extremely complicated and she portrays all sides of this woman perfectly. Scott Speedman of Felicity fame plays one of her sons and he’s excellent here as well. The whole cast is great.
My big complaint about Animal Kingdom is that they don’t show you much about how the “jobs,” as they call their crimes, will take place ahead of time. They might talk about how many security guards there will be and what kind of safe they place has and things like that but when they commit the crimes they use a lot of high tech equipment and such and since they never talk about it otherwise it’s kind of hard to believe that these guys would really know how to use that equipment. They never really convey that these guys are that smart during the majority of the show. Then the crimes happen and they’re using all of this fancy equipment and you find yourself wondering where they got that equipment and when and how they even learned how to use it. Maybe I’m not explaining it right. But you just get the impression that some of these guys are only moderately smart so then when they commit crimes with their fancy equipment it’s hard to believe that they could actually use that stuff.
My other complaint is that the show has some great guest stars but they don’t seem to know what to do with them. In one season, Dennis Leary plays the father of one of Smurf’s sons who shows up and basically spends much of the season hanging around the Cody house where he doesn’t really do much of anything aside from injecting himself with heroin. In another season, Emily Deschanel plays a woman who grew up with J’s mother, J being the cousin who goes to live with the Codys in the first episode of the series. She shows up and ends up staying at the Cody’s house but they don’t really utilize her character well. Almost every time we see her she’s just hanging around the Cody house where she tries to get close to J as well as Pope, one of the Cody brothers. You don’t know if she’s trying to pull some sort of scheme or if she’s just an ex-con, ex-junkie who’s just trying to reconnect with people she used to know. And they never really explain what her motive was. I won’t spoil things for anyone but it’s really odd how all of a sudden she’s just gone with her storyline not having reached any sort of climax or conclusion.
The thing I loved most about the series is watching J go from being this cousin that nobody trusts to the criminal mastermind running the whole show. And it’s interesting because J’s primary motive is revenge. His mother was Smurf’s daughter and Smurf treated her horribly so J wants Smurf and the Codys to pay. He’s a master manipulator playing the long game. In some ways, you don’t even realize what a complicated game of chess he’s playing until you’ve finished watching the final episode of the series.
I cannot finish this review without mentioning how terrific actor Shawn Hatosy is as Andrew “Pope” Cody. Hatosy is an actor who’s been in many, many shows and movies during the last 30 years or so. He usually plays a creep or bad guy. At first, I thought that Pope was going to be a creep and a bad guy by ultimately he seems to be the only Cody who wants to be good. It’s interesting because on one hand he’s the Cody who Smurf uses to murder people, etc, so he does the most vile things but he’s very conflicted about it and he seeks the comfort and absolution of attending churches and such. You think he’s a real psychopath at first, or at least a sociopath, but as it goes on you discover that he isn’t and that he’s the most complicated character in the series. And Hatosy is remarkable in this role. He makes you fear Pope and sympathize with him all at once.
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