Arterial Spray Your Thing? You'll Love Miles Teller's New Crime Series

There’s quality, and then there’s quality, if you know what I mean. Hmmm, maybe I should elaborate.

Let’s talk a bit about Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn for a moment. Now that’s a statement that may prompt some of the readership to slam shut their laptop or fling their device with all the ferocity and velocity of a fastball pitcher.

The maker of Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon has assiduously cultivated the persona of ‘slightly too big for their britches’ by boldly slapping their brand on their work (I personally love the whole byNWR thing he has going) and implying or outright stating that he’s some kind of creative genius (there’s a terrific interview between Refn and fellow enfant terrible William Friedkin where Friedkin seems simultaneously amused and bemused by Refn’s claim that Only God Forgives is “a masterpiece”). It would seem to be a case of Refn faking it 'til he makes it, except, for my money, he’s already making it – there’s precision in his craft and confidence in his vision. And if what he's dealing is not your bag, he doesn’t seem especially fussed by that. I admire that kind of take-it-or-leave-it bravado, even if there are times when I feel baffled or underwhelmed by what’s on offer.

So here’s a question: how willing will you be to take or leave Refn’s work when it’s brought to you? 14 June sees the premiere on Amazon Video of his 10-episode crime drama Too Old To Die Young, his first small-screen venture apart from a Miss Marple telemovie he helmed back in the day, and it’s… well, it’s very NWR.

Co-created by Ed Brubaker, primarily known for his hard-boiled comic book work, it’s shaping up as a crime saga featuring bad, misguided, overzealous or morally compromised people inflicting justifiable violence upon even worse people in a society that reached the “pinnacle of human achievement” before our hubris “broke the fabric of reality” (strap in, folks, this is how people talk in Too Old To Die Young). The series would seem to posit that we’re on the brink on a return to the Dark Ages, except it’s also strongly implying we never really emerged into enlightenment in the first place – it’s still mighty dark out there, with only a thin veneer of civilisation between us and the abyss.

So, yeah, that’s what you want on Friday night when you’ve poured a wine and Deliveroo’d a pizza right?

Something like Too Old To Die Young does inspire glib critique such as that – looking at the notes I took during episodes four and five, the only ones available for review, I wrote, “For those who felt True Detective wasn’t up itself enough,” and, “It’s like David Lynch rewrote and shot a Michael Mann script.” Of course, there’s every chance I was cracking wise to keep despair at bay, given that episode five kicks off with a genuinely gruelling sequence depicting a despicable calibre of scumbag targeted by LAPD officer and after-hours vigilante Martin Jones, played by Whiplash’s Miles Teller. (Does Teller have the same compelling stillness as Refn’s Drive star Ryan Gosling? No, but he’s not bad at letting the camera in, and he has a low-level version of Robert Mitchum’s surly allure, which goes a long way.)

Like the aforementioned Lynch, Refn has a tendency to let things linger – characters will regard each other silently for long periods of time; conversations will not have gaps but canyons; scenes play out in excruciatingly real time before bursting into graphic, unexpected brutality – and that’s a gamble. You either mentally check out and see what another channel or platform has to offer or you really ponder what it all means and what Refn was going for. And whether that’s a deep and meaningful treatise on man’s inhumanity to man, or simply a ten-episode art installation utilising .45s and arterial spray is up for you to interpret. But any way you look at or feel about Too Old To Die Young, it is the work of someone answering only to themselves. And that is challenging and invigorating.

Art that boldly displays the signature of its creator is one kind of quality. Let’s quickly discuss another kind – ballsy, pulpy storytelling that aims for a certain section of the brain and hits the fucking bullseye. Let’s talk about Warrior, premiering 12 June on Foxtel station Fox Showcase.

Quick history lesson: Back in 1971, Bruce Lee – starting to make a name for himself in Hollywood as a martial artist onscreen and off – pitched a TV series in which he’d play an Asian fighter in the old west. The industry passed on the idea but the following year saw the premiere of Kung Fu, a show starring David Carradine as… um, an Asian fighter in the old west. What a coincidence!

Nearly half a century later, Justin Lin of The Fast & The Furious fame discovered the existence of eight pages of notes outlining Lee’s original concept and, with the help of Lee’s daughter Shannon and Banshee writer-producer Jonathan Tropper, set about developing Warrior, in which butt-kicker extraordinaire Ah Sahm (played by Andrew Koji, whose slow-burn fuck-you attitude and explosive physicality should make him a damn superstar) arrives in San Francisco circa 1878 in search of his missing sister and gets himself ensnared into a bloody war between two competing Chinatown crime gangs.

Warrior has a big old canvas – there’s not only the various elements of Chinatown, there’s also the white side of town with bent politicians at the top end and frustrated Irish immigrants in the slums – and the storylines go at it with broad strokes, combining entry-level but intelligent exploration of social, political and racial unease with the kind of graphic eroticism and hard-hitting violence that keep the punters paying their Foxtel fees on the regular. Hey, I have nothing against a show appealing to the base instincts if it does so with integrity and gusto. Warrior has integrity and gusto to burn.