Mad Dogs and Englishmen go wrong in the midday sun
Mad Dogs was a spectacular waste of talent.
In fact I can’t remember the last time a series featured such a stellar cast and a decent director to such empty effect. With four of the most charismatic, attractive actors on British television planted in intriguing situations and exotic locations such as Majorca, Morocco and South Africa it was hard to see how Mad Dogs could go wrong.
The answer, sadly, was both all too simply.
The first assumption to go out of the window was the notion that, having persuaded Max Beasley, Marc Warren, John Simm and Philip Glenister to make space in their schedules, Sky would ensure that the third series would not make the same mistakes as series two. It would represent a return to the form of Mad Dog’s 2011 debut that earned it a BAFTA nomination.
Even that admittedly was nonsense but it was glamorous and exciting, stealing brazenly from Shallow Grave, Fargo, and particularly Sexy Beast with a heady, hedonistic brew of dead goats, stolen boats, Serbian gangsters, corrupt Spanish detectives, kilos of cocaine and a masked midget killer nicknamed ‘Tiny Blair.’
By the second series though, the twists were becoming more and more tenuous and laborious; the four main characters were frankly becoming a rather laddish bore.
So to series three which found our heroes: imprisoned illegally in the Moroccan desert, being interrogated by the British government, shot at for a bounty put up by the CIA, and finally given new secret identities and flown out to South Africa and sent their separate ways.
Hey, it could happen...
Like series two, it soon became clear that while the idea of the four Brits abroad dealing with increasingly dangerous/preposterous situations was not unappealing, the ‘plot’ was being stretched was being stretched more and more thinly.
At the start, the scenes in the deserted desert prison proved potentially powerful if overly stylised and ultimately dated. Rick, Woody, Baxter and Quinn were tortured in orange Quantanamo uniforms, using hoods, cages, tiled cells, and electrodes.
The combination of heat and dust and terror would have been more effective if we hadn’t seen them suffer it all before. Director Adrian Shergold (who made Persuasion, He Kills Coppers and the masterly Phil Daniels' series Holding On) continued to shoot everything in the high coloured glare of an American video.
Even 'Tiny Blair' had been replaced - in Rick's fevered imagination at least - by a terrifying Mad Max warrior pygmy figure, 'The Tokoloshe.'
The four traumatised Brits hadn't really developed despite all they'd been through. ‘I never called you,’ Quinn (Philip Glenister) raged, during yet another fractious discussion, ‘because I cannot bare your incessant moaning and complaining!’
Sadly, after two series of shouting, we knew how he felt.
As if to acknowledge this, an ostentatiously ‘feisty’ female captive was thrown into the mix to liven things up a bit in the shaven-headed shape of Mercedes (Jaime Winstone as an ex-squaddie who had been rounded by the government after going AWOL in Kabul). ‘There are no secrets !’ she protested. ‘Only hidden truths. Now they think I’m bloody Wikileaks!’
Winstone was certainly a chip off the old block – raging around like her dad Ray shouting ‘come on then ! You want some ?!’ at every opportunity - at prison guards or slammed doors alike. ‘You know what Churchill said ?’ she advised them sagely, as the boys were shipped off without her. ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’ Considering the talents on offer, any moments of actual dramatic depth were lamentably limited.
Before they took up their new identities, Quinn, Woody, Baxter and Rick were given one last phone call home. John Simm (Baxter) showed how powerful an actor he can be, as offered the chance to speak to only one of his two kids, he found he couldn’t speak to either and was left pleading with his wife: ‘please don’t let them think that I’ve abandoned them.’ Trying to say goodbye, Quinn (Glenister) poignantly found that his dad would only talk about what to do about his satellite dish.
Of course, Mad Dogs is not high drama but it had none of the imagination or jeopardy of a Breaking Bad and was a missed opportunity. That said, the scene in which the lads chose names for their new identities was neatly handled, doffing an obvious cap to the likes of Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Elmore Leonard. 'You can’t call yourself Floyd Carter!' Baxter scolded Rick. ‘It’s a black name. It’s like calling yourself Everton or Tyrell.’
Rick – the big kid of the four, the romantic – said that if he were a girl he'd give himself a name that had an element of being hopeful, 'like...Hope.' He suggested their new names should be ‘some thing that means something – like the Native Americans do’ before coming up with the name ‘James... Kirk.’ Baxter duly became Adam Newhouse, Quinn was Blake Hatch, and Woody, typically, the more mundane Tony Smith. In scenes like this, you could feel the rapport that the four stars and the team working on Mad Dogs had developed away on these locations, like a band on the road.
Perhaps if scriptwriter Cris Cole had spent as much time on the actual plot as enjoying making up funny new names for his characters, Mad Dogs wouldn’t have been such thin fare for them to work with and such a let down for us to watch.
In fact I can’t remember the last time a series featured such a stellar cast and a decent director to such empty effect. With four of the most charismatic, attractive actors on British television planted in intriguing situations and exotic locations such as Majorca, Morocco and South Africa it was hard to see how Mad Dogs could go wrong.
The answer, sadly, was both all too simply.
The first assumption to go out of the window was the notion that, having persuaded Max Beasley, Marc Warren, John Simm and Philip Glenister to make space in their schedules, Sky would ensure that the third series would not make the same mistakes as series two. It would represent a return to the form of Mad Dog’s 2011 debut that earned it a BAFTA nomination.
Even that admittedly was nonsense but it was glamorous and exciting, stealing brazenly from Shallow Grave, Fargo, and particularly Sexy Beast with a heady, hedonistic brew of dead goats, stolen boats, Serbian gangsters, corrupt Spanish detectives, kilos of cocaine and a masked midget killer nicknamed ‘Tiny Blair.’
By the second series though, the twists were becoming more and more tenuous and laborious; the four main characters were frankly becoming a rather laddish bore.
So to series three which found our heroes: imprisoned illegally in the Moroccan desert, being interrogated by the British government, shot at for a bounty put up by the CIA, and finally given new secret identities and flown out to South Africa and sent their separate ways.
Hey, it could happen...
Like series two, it soon became clear that while the idea of the four Brits abroad dealing with increasingly dangerous/preposterous situations was not unappealing, the ‘plot’ was being stretched was being stretched more and more thinly.
At the start, the scenes in the deserted desert prison proved potentially powerful if overly stylised and ultimately dated. Rick, Woody, Baxter and Quinn were tortured in orange Quantanamo uniforms, using hoods, cages, tiled cells, and electrodes.
The combination of heat and dust and terror would have been more effective if we hadn’t seen them suffer it all before. Director Adrian Shergold (who made Persuasion, He Kills Coppers and the masterly Phil Daniels' series Holding On) continued to shoot everything in the high coloured glare of an American video.
Even 'Tiny Blair' had been replaced - in Rick's fevered imagination at least - by a terrifying Mad Max warrior pygmy figure, 'The Tokoloshe.'
The four traumatised Brits hadn't really developed despite all they'd been through. ‘I never called you,’ Quinn (Philip Glenister) raged, during yet another fractious discussion, ‘because I cannot bare your incessant moaning and complaining!’
Sadly, after two series of shouting, we knew how he felt.
As if to acknowledge this, an ostentatiously ‘feisty’ female captive was thrown into the mix to liven things up a bit in the shaven-headed shape of Mercedes (Jaime Winstone as an ex-squaddie who had been rounded by the government after going AWOL in Kabul). ‘There are no secrets !’ she protested. ‘Only hidden truths. Now they think I’m bloody Wikileaks!’
Winstone was certainly a chip off the old block – raging around like her dad Ray shouting ‘come on then ! You want some ?!’ at every opportunity - at prison guards or slammed doors alike. ‘You know what Churchill said ?’ she advised them sagely, as the boys were shipped off without her. ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’ Considering the talents on offer, any moments of actual dramatic depth were lamentably limited.
Before they took up their new identities, Quinn, Woody, Baxter and Rick were given one last phone call home. John Simm (Baxter) showed how powerful an actor he can be, as offered the chance to speak to only one of his two kids, he found he couldn’t speak to either and was left pleading with his wife: ‘please don’t let them think that I’ve abandoned them.’ Trying to say goodbye, Quinn (Glenister) poignantly found that his dad would only talk about what to do about his satellite dish.
Of course, Mad Dogs is not high drama but it had none of the imagination or jeopardy of a Breaking Bad and was a missed opportunity. That said, the scene in which the lads chose names for their new identities was neatly handled, doffing an obvious cap to the likes of Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Elmore Leonard. 'You can’t call yourself Floyd Carter!' Baxter scolded Rick. ‘It’s a black name. It’s like calling yourself Everton or Tyrell.’
Rick – the big kid of the four, the romantic – said that if he were a girl he'd give himself a name that had an element of being hopeful, 'like...Hope.' He suggested their new names should be ‘some thing that means something – like the Native Americans do’ before coming up with the name ‘James... Kirk.’ Baxter duly became Adam Newhouse, Quinn was Blake Hatch, and Woody, typically, the more mundane Tony Smith. In scenes like this, you could feel the rapport that the four stars and the team working on Mad Dogs had developed away on these locations, like a band on the road.
Perhaps if scriptwriter Cris Cole had spent as much time on the actual plot as enjoying making up funny new names for his characters, Mad Dogs wouldn’t have been such thin fare for them to work with and such a let down for us to watch.
Original article can be found here.
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