Jason Bateman and Jude Law are convincing as brothers who keep making things worse. Their performances justify a look at this uneven crime drama, but repetitive plotting makes eight episodes feel generous.
The useful question in Black Rabbit is why these brothers keep accepting trouble from one another. Across eight episodes, the answer involves addiction, dependency and the familiar difficulty of abandoning family, even when family keeps making things worse. We found it a decent, uneven crime drama, carried by Jason Bateman and Jude Law through stretches the writing has not earned. It is worth considering for their performances, provided patience with self-destructive men comes readily.
Bateman plays Vince Friedken, with Law as Jake, and their chemistry does much of the work that the writing leaves unfinished. Vince is the sort of likeable disaster whose next mistake seems entirely avoidable until his charm gets to work. We wanted Jake to stop making allowances for him, and were surprised by how much we cared. Bateman gives Jake enough reason to stay involved, while Law makes that continued attachment convincing.
The New York restaurant and nightlife setting supplies an interest beyond the next family crisis. Cinematographers Peter Konczal and Igor Martinović give the city a grubby, restless quality that makes the brothers’ troubles feel at home there. Alex DiGerlando’s production design helps the restaurant milieu feel inhabited rather than merely supplied as a fashionable backdrop. There is enough life in these surroundings to suggest a broader drama, and sometimes we wished the series would pay more attention to it.
Zach Baylin and Kate Susman are among the credited writers, and the scripts are less persuasive when they have to keep the story moving. Too often, a fresh mistake supplies movement without telling us anything further about the person making it. The brothers’ dependency explains a good deal, but using it repeatedly does not make each escalation equally interesting. Supporting characters also struggle for definition, leaving the leads to carry more than even this pairing can manage.
That repetition is particularly costly over eight episodes. Editors Vikash Patel, Kyle Reiter and Cedric Nairn-Smith have an escalating plot to organise, but the series still takes too long to establish its pace and spends too much time renewing familiar problems. Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s score contributes to the anxiety, though there is already plenty supplied by the brothers. We grew tired of the mounting trouble because so much of it came from decisions whose foolishness was already clear.
Troy Kotsur, as Joe Mancuso, is a welcome exception to the thinness around the brothers, giving the supporting cast some force of its own. Justin Kurzel’s direction of the final two episodes also gives the thriller a firmer grip, without curing the slackness that precedes them. The tighter direction makes the danger easier to care about. More of that urgency earlier would have helped.
The better family crime dramas let us understand a terrible choice before asking us to sit through its consequences. Here, the acting provides that understanding more reliably than the scripts, which too often fall back on the same failings. Try it for Bateman and Law if difficult siblings are your sort of television; expect to wish somebody had cut an episode or two.
