Justified - Season 2

The first season of Justified was a very good cop show, often ignoring an overarching story in favor of occasionally familiar stand-alone cases for Tim Olyphant's Raylan Givens to solve, but loaded with good acting, great dialogue, and a ton of culturual flavor specific to the southern region it takes place in, and finished strong with a bloody, multi-episode conflict between Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder and his father. The second season looked like it might do the same thing at first, though the early cases connected much more directly to the grander story threads that begin in the first episode and it wasn't very long at all before the plot kicked into high gear. Tangential subplots still sprang up, but everything felt much tighter this time, like the writers sat down and hammered out a full story before they even thought of doing anything else, and it resulted in a deeper, better show this time around. It wasn't perfect, but I fully expect it to end up as one of my five favorite TV dramas of this year. And if it doesn't... well, I can't wait to see what could possibly be in store from the rest of the medium.

Raylan was a big reason the show was so fun in the first place, bringing a thrilling sense of old fashioned justice to some otherwise ordinary story ideas. What's remarkable is that the show hardly even needed him to be like that this year to be great. Of course Raylan doesn't hurt anything, and he's still a very interesting guy. But he became much more just a part of the series' incredibly rich tapestry of interwoven, unfriendly families, and I would say he's probably only the third most intriguing guy on his own show at best. Boyd spends a good amount of time not sure what he wants as the season starts, but he eventually gets back in the game and is as fascinating as ever. And most impressive was Margo Martindale as Mags Bennet, a woman who at first seems to be a friendly, motherly shopkeeper, but turns out to run illegal activities in her county with a frightening verve and keen intellect. We see how Raylan wasn't the only person to grow up there with that old sense of right and wrong and how things should be dealt with, and the exploration of the history of the Givens, Bennet, and Crowder clans while those rivalries reignite in the modern day is exciting and compelling every step of the way.

The show's still violent (in the surprising and poetic way that only the best shows are), but the shootouts don't carry the stories quite the way they did last time. Mags has three sons who help her business (the standout being Dickie who's played by Jeremy Davies, and who you never quite get a handle on the true nature of), Boyd has a new relationship with Ava and a new crew to run with, Raylan has a relationship with his coworkers that continues to develop in fits and starts (Rachel and Tim still hardly count as characters, but Art is great) and an ex-wife with husband issues and a continued uneasy alliance with Boyd, and the way the show lets all of these little pieces get thrown into a blender and come out in unexpected patterns and combinations never stops being fun to watch. Throw in a nefarious mining company looking to get rich off their home turf, and there's a lot to juggle in just 13 episodes, but the cast and crew were definitely up to the task. The plot they cooked up came to a satisfying resolution without forgetting to leave a few threads ready for the third season to pick up and run with next year, a season I am now early in the process of being unable to wait for. I'm not sure I really care about Raylan's home life as much as they wanted us to, but otherwise Justified is as entertaining a cop show as you're ever likely to see.

The Other Guys

Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay continue their fruitful partnership of serviceable and occasionally brilliant but often flawed comedies with The Other Guys, a send up of buddy cop movies (which are themselves already pretty silly in nature) with an odd sense of humor and an even odder political stance against the seedy nature of big money in America. The bad guys in the story are basically using fraud to cover up losses, and the entire end credits of the film feature animated information about things like how Ponzi schemes work and the average salaries of CEOs in comparison to regular workers over time. This is probably the wrong movie to throw an issue like this into, though I appreciate the effort.

The movie starts out bombastically with a ridiculous car chase through New York City as Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson attempt to stop some drug dealers. It's one of the most wonderfully absurd action scenes played for laughs I've seen, and it's a great start for the movie. I would watch a whole film about Johnson and Jackson as these superhero cop characters. But it's not about them, it's about the other guys, played by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Ferrell plays a number cruncher and paperwork doer who'd rather stay in the office than chase bad guys, and Wahlberg was a promising young cop who had his career derailed after he shot a famous athlete. They're mostly the subject of ridicule, but they see an opportunity to make a big case after they arrest a businessman played by Steve Coogan and he is then kidnapped by armed thugs. People with money don't like Ferrell and Wahlberg sniffing around their affairs, and they are harassed at every turn by their fellow cops and other things working against them.

The structure of the story could have pretty much just been a regular buddy cop movie, but it's the specific weirdness of the situations and dialogue that make it a Will Ferrell comedy. The film just comes up with a ton of running gags and lets them ride, and some of them end up being pretty funny. Some of the better ones include all the horrible things that happen to the interior of Ferrell's Prius, his dark past, and Wahlberg's habit of studying fine arts so he can make fun of people who enjoy them. Some bits are weirder; Ferrell's innate attraction to beautiful women is cute but offset by what's basically an emotionally abusive marriage that's played for laughs.

Ferrell's mix of low key and very loud methods of being funny are in full effect and enjoyable as usual, and while I would say Wahlberg definitely isn't a natural comic actor (or a natural actor at all, really), his hit rate on one liners is generally pretty decent. Michael Keaton is great as the police captain, and his role is another I'd love to see revisited in a Rock/Jackson prequel. The movie is overstuffed to the point of bursting with recognizable comedic talent, and most of the cameos usually have at least one decent joke attached instead of just being their for their own sake. Ice-T's narration in particular is memorable. Not every joke is a success and I would have preferred a less self-serious plot, but it was a pretty fun movie.

Justified - Season 1

The only reason I didn't watch Justified when it premiered early last year was that I wanted to see Walton Goggins' acclaimed work there before moving on to the new show he was in. Sort of silly, but I'm glad I did in anyway so my impressions of Shane remained uncolored. The DVD came out in time to catch up before season two begins in a couple weeks, so there's nothing really lost anyway. Justified is a hybrid of police procedurals and serialized drama, set in the deep South of Kentucky and starring Timothy Olyphant as author Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens, an old-fashioned lawman living in a modern age. The style is sort of a mix of elements from westerns and detective novels, with Givens having both the keen wit and lightning trigger finger necessary to work as the protagonist of either. He doesn't quite fit in to today's world, shown in the premiere when he's shipped from Miami back to his hometown after he kills a man in broad daylight, and put on the low end of the totem pole in the Marshall's office. There's something dark hidden under his cool exterior, and the first season does a good job of exploring that a bit while leaving some mystery intact, and establishing him as one of the most interesting and entertaining protagonists on TV.

There's more to the show than just him though, as he has to deal with his estranged father, the criminal network and family of old friend Boyd played by Goggins, and a multitude of other issues that arise from week to week. The show juggles stand-alone cases with the more long-term elements pretty deftly, especially as the season goes on and the two become more integrated. Only the premiere and maybe the last three episodes don't have any elements unrelated to the central story, but you hardly notice one way or the other just because the weekly stuff is so generally strong. Not every one is a grand mystery, but even the most obvious ones are amazingly enjoyable thanks to near-universally great writing and casting, and when things tie back into larger goings-on it feels like a bonus rather than a relief. The dialogue is sharp, the whole cast is interesting enough with Olyphant and Goggins at the center, and the violence is remarkably bloody and well-filmed for a cable show.

Really, there's not much about the show not to like. Maybe if it was more focused on a story and the main characters rather than having fun with a bunch of different one-offs, it could have pulled off something even greater in the end. But even with the divided attention, they managed to complete a really entertaining and satisfying arc through these first thirteen episodes, basically having their cake and eating it too. There's enough left open to keep the possibilities of the next season exciting, especially with some of the choices a couple characters make by the end, and it's just a well-produced, funny show that you can check out once in a while or watch every week. It makes you wonder why networks can't get this stuff right - so often you either get a serialized show that doesn't go anywhere or an episodic one with highly fluctuating levels of quality from one episode to the next, and Justified handles both aspects with ease. I guess it just comes down to the quality of the source material, the writing, and the casting - Justified is filled to the brim with talented character actors who just aren't famous enough to be on movie posters. It's not perfect, but it's as solid as shows with its somewhat modest aspirations can get.