Black Rabbit review: Jason Bateman and Jude Law in Netflix crime thriller

There’s a certain demographic that’s really, really, really going to like Black Rabbit, the latest family crime thriller series on streaming.

It ticks a lot of boxes for fans of the genre – it’s frenetic, it has two male leads (brothers no less) dark cinematography, gangsters who like to cut off fingers, a jewellery heist, hot female bartenders, Jason Bateman, and people making truly terrible life choices.

Ding, ding, ding!

In all seriousness, Black Rabbit is not a bad show. It’s even sometimes a good show, especially as the series deepens its core relationship in the back half of its eight-episode run, culminating with two decent chapters directed by Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel.

But there is certainly a lot of been-there-done-that, and in a category – men behaving badly - that has reached saturation levels. Black Rabbit, if it’s trying to reinvent the wheel, was very, very subtle about it.

For a segment of the audience, the familiarity is the point, and you have to give Bateman credit for turning in a spiky performance of someone you ultimately empathise with.

Bateman is Vince Friedkin, a middle-aged wastrel who returns home to New York City after a small-time deal goes south in Reno. He was trying to sell a collection of rare coin to a pair of crooks when they decide to rob him. Someone ends up dead and he high-tails it out of there.

That immediately sets up the dynamic of Vince’s life – he was screwed over but his choices put him in that situation. What do you do with someone like that?

His brother Jake (Jude Law) doesn’t know, and he’s not necessarily happy to see his brother return and disrupt his rising star in the NYC hospitality industry. Jake runs the Black Rabbit, a multi-storey bar and restaurant that has real heat behind it, which he wants to parlay into a new venture taking over an iconic city venue.

But it’s not as if Jake’s life is all hunky-dory. His financial situation is a house of cards that could blow over with a light breeze – and Vince is a hurricane.

When he left NYC some years ago, Vince was still over $100,000 in debt to mobster Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur), and you don’t want to trifle with him or his volatile son Junior (Forrest Weber) and associate Babbit (Chris Coy).

Vince’s problem immediately becomes Jake’s problem and the eight episodes track their increasingly frantic scuffles with every challenge that befalls them.

And there’s a lot going on, which includes sexual assaults at the club, an affair, journalists asking questions, a shady lawyer (Morgan Spector), and semi-estranged family members (Odessa Young as Vince’s daughter, Gen).

Black Rabbit can be nerve-wracking at times, especially any scene involving the younger mobsters whose presence can be generously described as frustrating, as the swirls of problems whip up into impossible situations.

At its core, the show is about these two brothers and how they’ve been formed and marred by the sins of their parents, which bonds them in a toxic relationship where neither can quit the other.

There is beauty in that, even when you know it’s not smart. That’s the overarching conflict at the centre of Black Rabbit – people always making the intellectually wrong choice, but you (mostly) understand why. That feeling of exasperation in the viewing experience comes from that.

Law is reliably good, and can carry the character as everything begins to fall down around him, but it’s Bateman who breaks through. While he may run around, panicked, for the most of the show, there are a few scenes in the final episodes that really gets to the heart of why Vince is who he is – and Bateman is a marvel to watch.

But you have to get through a lot of expected beats before you get there – and your mileage will depend a lot on just how much time you want to commit to yet another grim crime thriller about silly men.

On the plus-side, at least it’s not true crime!

Rating: 3/5

Black Rabbit is streaming on Netflix