The Westies review – This violent New York mob drama is like Peaky Blinders meets The Sopranos | television

TThe Peaky Blinders influence still exists. More than a decade after Tommy Shelby’s debut, TV still loves its real-life gangster cast, especially with Blinders creator Steven Knight recently reprising the fact-based gimmick with A Thousand Blows. What other IRL historical crime kits are still available? All this time, the Westies, an Irish-American gang operating in New York in the 1980s in a fractious alliance with the Italian-American Gambino crime family, have been there. It’s the Irish Mafia and the actual Mafia in a two-for-one deal.

Along with co-creator Michael Banes, the man who scored that obvious open goal by making Peaky Sopranos is Chris Brancato, a showrunner whose resume includes Narcos and the quietly excellent Godfather of Harlem. With some strong players in the cast, The Westies is… well. decent. it’s good! What do you want from me, eh? I said it was fine.

JK Simmons is Eamonn Sweeney, leader of the Westies. Sweeney works out of a portable cabin on a Hell’s Kitchen construction site, because—as he helpfully explains near the beginning of the first episode, to an underling who certainly knows this—he has brokered a deal in which his Irish crew, not the more powerful Italians, get a piece of a million-dollar construction project. To keep the commissions flowing, Sweeney has to keep the Gambino candy.

There are two problems with this: the young Irish-Americans who serve as Sweeney’s soldiers are violent and reckless drunks, and their Italian equivalents are violent and impulsive whether they have been drinking or not. Emerging from the bloody chaos that will inevitably produce two potential new leaders. On the Italian side is future mafia star John Gotti (Hamish Alan Headley), who sees no reason why the Irish should be accommodated at all. For the Irish, Jimmy Rourke (Tom Brittney, hardly recognizable as the guy who played the sexy vicar in Grantchester) is Sweeney’s brightest lieutenant, but he’s heading in a different direction from his boss and is more loyal than anything to his friend Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan), a big-hearted but unstable Vietnam vet who begins the job strapped to a bed, receiving electroshock therapy. While he’s away, Mickey misses a memo about not messing with the Italians.

In the orbits of the main characters is New York police officer Glen Keenan, a weak-willed gambler and drinker played by the gorgeously haired Titus Welliver, whose puffy silver mustache and black mustache give him the appearance of a black-and-white portrait of a depressed parrot; and Jamie’s friend Bridget Walsh (Sarah Bolger), a wise sounding board who helps out with the Westies but is more interested in fighting for the freedom of Ireland, a cause she used to advance in person but now campaigns for remotely. When her old friend Brendan Cahill (Allen Leech) comes to ask a favor, Bridget must decide whether to get involved again.

The series is concerned with fathers and children, most clearly in the story of Keenan, a lost widower who desperately tries to prevent his teenage son Danny (Aidan Wojtak-Hessong) from being drawn into the Western lifestyle. Sweeney’s lack of children may be his downfall, since his instinct to find a surrogate son in Jimmy is no substitute for the real thing.

The Westies are at their best when indulging in the most guilty pleasures of the mob genre, playing punches for laughs and enjoying riding with Roarke’s gang when they’re half-cut and carrying out outrageous plans. A series of questionable decisions lead to a brilliantly disturbing dismemberment scene in the back room of a butcher shop, followed by an extended caper with a severed hand; The boys’ surveillance of a nightclub where the Colombians hide their headquarters for the cocaine trade – coke is a business that will be taken over by a new generation of gangsters, who will push their elders aside to demand new riches – culminates with extreme violence.

The most serious moments are those when the West cannot distinguish itself. Bringing an expectation of tyranny that never quite arrives, Simmons strains to give Sweeney a soft, weary edge, depriving his boss of the fear he needs. Meanwhile, Alan Headley is really struggling to advance Gotti from an ambitious young mafioso: There’s no fear when he invites you to sit at a restaurant table with a red-and-white checkered cloth so he can crack your balls, because we’ve seen this guy before. Welliver’s hack cop Keenan is too pathetic and tired to care. A lot of the supporting players are either stereotypes or empty.

The only cast members who have the energy that comes from being sure of their characters are Britney and Bolger. He gives Rourke a good mix of idealism and intelligence, while making Walsh equal parts steely and neurotic. They are excellent; But a lot of the Westies are competent.