Thursday, 09/21/06

"Smith" is one of the new fall shows, the third or fourth recent attempt, a decade after the fact, to bottle "Heat" and turn it into a weekly series. Andre Braugher's "Thief" looked great, but I blinked and missed it during my exciting homeless period. It was only six episodes and FX opted not to renew it, notwithstanding Braugher's obvious genius, and eventual Emmy.

There was another NBC attempt last year with Dougray Scott, who never seems credible to me except when he's playing a petulant villain. Distractingly, the cops on that one were all actors from other FX series, including Shane's scary wife from The Shield, Reno Williams from that program about the supernatural tabloid that only printed the truth, and Billy Gardell from "Lucky", the best show ever about a degenerate gambler. All the cop segments on this show, whatever it was called, felt like they had been written by interns.

There's also Hustle, a Brit import airing on AMC, which I hear is so good that I'm not willing to start in the middle.

So now there's Smith, and it just shows what a sucker I am for the this genre that I sat through it. The planning and execution of a museum robbery that should have taken at least half a season played out in about forty-eight minutes, interrupted by limited trailer-length ads for "The Departed", which looks darned respectable but probably not equal to its source material. Smith has Ray Liotta in the De Niro role (the meticulous planner with "three or four" more jobs in him) and the awesome Virginia Madsen in what looks to be a completely wasted role as the wife who would rather he not go to jail. Then there's a muscle guy, and a femme fatale, and a sociopath, and a recently-unincarcerated limey, and a computer dork.

So they rob the museum and the third guard comes out of the bathroom unexpectedly to shoot the limey about nine times in the chest. I wouldn't be writing about this except for what happens next, which is a long sequence set to a song I'd never heard before, covering their explodey exit and the limey's subsequent viking funeral, as they blow up their getaway-boat and skip town on a jetplane.

The song was remarkable because it was a capella pumped through a vocoder, which makes it sound like it was generated by a soulful lady robot. (I came into work and said "female a capella vocoder" to Brian, and he said "that's Imogen Heap" without blinking.) It's fucking gorgeous, one of those songs that's so catchy that it'll get stuck in my head before I properly know the tune.

So, the surviving menfolk leave the burning boat and walk back to their car past the femme fatale, who had a thing going with the limey and who takes in his absence with the briefest slippage of stoicism. Then it's a quick cut back to the plane ride home (should they all have been on the same plane? No, probably not), but very cleverly, they're now shooting the plane from the front, instead of from the back as on the inbound flight, which seems to serve as a hint that the chronology is off just as I notice the limey sitting calmly in his seat. As the song crescendos and plays out, the femme fatale looks back at the limey and, through the duration of her gaze, invites him to fuck her in the bathroom, an offer whose outcome was in no serious doubt.

It was surprisingly touching, structuring the show so that the limey gets a last fling with the woman who was Obviously Trouble once he's already been written out. This 4:21 scene (precisely the length of the song, and bloody good job not to butcher it down) was far and away the high point of the pilot, so much so that I watched the getaway sequence again twice this morning and once more tonight.

And tonight, on the fourth viewing, I notice that in the Wild Bunch/Reservoir Dogs walk back to the car after blowing up the boat, the limey is clearly visible strolling behind Ray Liotta! What a massive continuity screwup! Or so I thought, until I wondered why Muscles was so broken up over the limey's death, when the limey was only shown to have a male relationship with the sociopath.

And thus, it becomes unescapable that the thief who got shot to pieces was actually Muscles' friend the computer dork, and all the chronological cleverness I'd read into this sequence was a pure product of misunderstanding and wishful thinking. The sex on the plane wasn't a lovely note of finality, it was just a lazy device for signaling the beginning of the limey's annoying relationship with the woman who is Obviously Trouble.

If the musical scene had been fractionally less interesting, and if I hadn't watched it a fourth time, I'd be tuning in next week. Here's hoping it gets canceled by Christmas and Virginia Madsen can go back to making movies. 10:08PM «

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