Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Mad Dogs, Sky1, review
If you hadn't seen the first two series of Mad Dogs – the British lad-drama that follows the fortunes of four hapless fortysomething friends as they get tangled up in drugs and intrigue while on holiday in Spain – the first episode of series three (Sky1, Tuesday) will have seemed profoundly surreal.
It opened with a succession of disjointed, flashbulb scenes: chap with wires coming out of his head, chap being hit by a car, demonic being with a tail. Then it settled on a dusty compound in which the four heroes stood in bewilderment, wearing orange prisoners' uniforms.
To the initiated, this will have made more sense. At the end of the last series, after several dead bodies and at least one dead goat, our heroes ended up making their escape in possession of five million Euros. The current premise, therefore, was that they had been caught by the Moroccan authorities, had the money confiscated, and been interned in a secret interrogation camp owned by the British government (politically distasteful, but we weren't invited to give this too much thought). Think Sexy Beast meets Shallow Grave and you'll be in the right tequila bar.
Let's make no bones about it: the blend of blokey comedy with casual violence has been a winning formula ever since Vinnie Jones hung up his football boots. Here we had more of the same. At a moment of high tension, when the four men were sitting on a bench in a dingy office waiting to discover their fate, Baxter (John Simm) got up and fixed the bench's wobbly leg. Later, he avoided being shot by thugs associated with the CIA – who were incidentally portrayed as grubby tyrants in bed with organised crimals, another problematic suggestion which was glossed over – by bending over to swat a fly.
This first episode was all screwball chase scenes and witty misery ("One minute I'm standing in line with a tuna baguette waiting for my EasyJet flight, the next I'm being renditioned!").
The only real weakness was the female character, Mercedes (Jaime Winstone), a shaven-headed, tattooed soldier who "bonded" with our heroes by attacking them. In a genre like this, the silliness has got to hit a certain level of sophistication. As a character, Mercedes was unconvincing, so when she responded to questions like "did you go to Afghanistan with the Army" with ripostes like "nah I went for the opera", it just felt a bit lame. Generally, however, when Mad Dogs was silly it was silly in a good way, and the perky pace made it easy to enjoy.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2cd7f791/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0Ctv0Eand0Eradio0Ereviews0C10A0A995130CMad0EDogs0ESky10Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
