FREE TO AIR
The Legacy, SBS One, 9.30pm
More a “who will do it?” than a whodunit, this latest thriller from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, makers of Borgen and The Killing, continues the Nordic noir tradition with the story of a family’s fallout over inheritance. That most ugly of familial frictions continues to heat up in this second episode, in which the four adult children of multimillionaire artist Veronika Gronnegaard (Kirsten Olesen) reunite for her lavish funeral, in the home she has bequeathed to a museum displaying her work. Touching scenes of grieving siblings soon give way to furious exchanges against a backdrop of reverence and exquisite Scandinavian furnishings. The Legacy promises to be as intriguing as its predecessors, exploring the darker side of human nature with the gravity and attention to detail that makes this genre so compelling.
Tattoo Tales, ABC, 9.40pm
A pleasant deviation from the flood of overseas reality tattoo shows (Tattoo Rescues, Tattoo Nightmares and the Ink franchise), this Australian documentary, filmed inside a Bondi tattoo parlour, follows a crew of delightful characters and their diverse clients. The stories tonight range from the amusing (a British comedian requesting “An inspirational quote to make me feel better about myself”) to the unexceptional (a woman getting the names of her children engraved on her back) to the quietly moving (an 83-year-old woman getting her third tattoo in memory of her daughter).
Hawaii Five-O, Ten, 10.30pm
There is a moment, in the opening scenes of this episode, where it may appear that this all-American, sun-drenched crime series might be in danger of jumping the shark in spectacularly scary fashion. But no, the victim is not rising from the dead to join Hawaii’s zombie race. Rather, the gruesome sequence is a reverse re-enactment of the shooting of a hula dancer. Fortunately for the handsome detectives presumably dragged once again from their deckchairs, help is on hand in the form of a veteran private investigator with links to the dead woman’s father. Forensic expert Dr Mindy Shaw (Amanda Setton) is rattled by the stiff’s resemblance to her murdered childhood friend, but finds solace in straddling her surfboard beyond the breakers.
Bridget McManus
PAY TV
The Following, FX, 8.30pm
Coming cold to the second season of this serial-killer drama, the questions pile up quickly – beginning with ‘‘Why on Earth is Kevin Bacon in this?’’ This isn’t a True Detective-tier drama that might lure a bona-fide movie star to the small screen. It’s an overly bloody network-TV slasher with zero plausibility and none of the panache of, say, a Hannibal. Bacon plays Ryan Hardy, a former FBI agent who spent last season trying to recapture escaped serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), who had somehow succeeded in founding a very active social club of like-minded murderers. Then Carroll died in a fire ... or did he? The FBI tries to get Hardy back on the case, not knowing that he’s going vigilante. Absolute hogwash.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Drive, (2011), SBS Two, 8.30pm
A violently sleek, dreamy tribute to the landscape of early ’80s Hollywood crime cinema (Michael Mann’s Thief, William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.), Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a movie about movies, with Ryan Gosling as the racing driver who moonlights as a stuntman in the motion picture trade and a getaway wheelman for heists. His character is such a mythic outline that he doesn’t have a name, nor does he say a great deal, and there are echoes of Steve McQueen in Bullitt in his evaluative gaze and mysterious decision making. Coaxed into a job as a test of his moral strength, he helps the ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) of his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who is both slightly spooked and intoxicated by his masculine silence, and he’s perfectly framed by the violent justification of Albert Brooks’ gangster and sometime movie producer, who understands that a movie man must have a code, even when wielding a hammer.
Three Kings, (1999), stan.com.au
The first line from Three Kings, David O. Russell’s acerbic and inventive Desert Storm heist flick, is ‘‘are we shooting?’’ and throughout the movie none of the American troops, present as Kuwait is liberated from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but uncertain of what to do next, know the answer. The film occurs in the netherworld between the ceasefire and the peace – Saddam loyalists are concerned only with putting down the domestic rebellion fostered (but not supported) by then US President George Bush at the end of the 1991 war, leaving riches looted from Kuwait dangling for American troops willing to take the risk. Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), a Special Forces veteran reduced to shepherding media to pre-approved stories, is more than willing, as are a group of reservists – including Mark Wahlberg’s polite trooper, Ice Cube’s Muslim Sergeant and Spike Jonze as an excitable hillbilly – celebrating a victory to which they’ve barely contributed. The quartet’s attempt to steal the gold keeps clashing with the realisation that they’re abandoning the Iraqis. It’s a bitter twist on the American Dream: make your fortune or promote freedom, but they’re mutually exclusive. Shot with an uneasily distorted colour palette and cut to Carter Burwell’s heavy-on-the-high-hat score, Three Kings is a satire made with tart empathy. A shoot-out is constructed as a sequence of gunshot wounds that deliberately excises the excitement of combat, while even the Iraqi interrogator (Said Taghmaoui) who tortures Wahlberg’s Troy exists outside the genre.
Craig Mathieson
