It’s an altogether milder kettle of trout. It is, in essence, a Saga cruise in a Stetson; a languid meditation on retirement stuffed with cloying aphorisms and thuddingly simplistic depictions of grief.
It doesn’t help that Fiennes Tiffin has been teamed with the explosively charismatic Finn, whose presence here reduces everyone within the blast zone to a smoking hillock of moustache. Still. The Tintinny stuff is a hoot and Firth is a blustery joy. And there’s a breeziness to all the capering that ensures even at its most geezerish, this is one Guy Ritchie joint wot ain’t entirely pony.
A strange and exasperating thing that clomps between aerated royal soap, plodding police procedural, exuberant coming-of-age period piece and hand-wringing domestic drama with the grace of a pantomime horse at a black-tie buffet.
So, huzzah for the pace and the balls. But boohoo for those who, having hoped for more than merely a louder re-tread of the first series, may now find themselves, as Fagin grumbles at one point, “a bit bleedin’ put out”.
It’s hugely enjoyable stuff. Directed by David “Bros: After the Screaming Stops” Soutar and told through new, off-screen interviews with the three remaining Thats, the series is replete with archive footage, acres and acres of the stuff, brilliantly edited and much of it previously unseen.
The tone remains wildly uneven, lurching as it does between steeple-fingered Game of Thrones-y glumness and those early-90s Saturday afternoon series in which an uncommunicative hunk wanders between small communities, rescuing imperilled innocents from baddies while learning about the true meaning of friendship.
But the script. Oh, the script. There is the line, “They say hatred and love are two sides of the same coin.” Someone else says, “Rest assured, this incident will not be forgotten easily, Dougal MacKenzie!” before ducking for cover as another girder of exposition crashes from the rafters. It is both atrocious and very watchable.
A hugely elaborate and wildly entertaining thing that happens very quickly and at great budgetary expense only to be promptly buried under the demands of a more immediately pressing plot strand.
