TV Review
Diana Wichtel
‘ Somewhere as unlikely as possible”: that’s the place to go, apparently, when a bad guy is doing some particularly menacing eyebrow-beetling in your direction. Ruthless gang boss Ravn is played by Mark Mitchinson, a local television presence who has become so freakishly ubiquitous you wouldn’t be surprised if he popped up doing the weather on 1 News.
In TVNZ 1’s Danish-New Zealand coproduction, inexplicably named Straight Forward, he is behind a murder at a nice family dinner in Copenhagen of a thief who has crossed him. The dead man’s daughter, Silvia, also a bit bent, explains the complex situation to her own daughter, teenager Ida: “Something went wrong and we have to hide.”
Ida and her grandmother, Lisbeth, duly hide. Silvia hops on a plane bound for our own unlikely isles. Silvia’s feet have barely hit the ground in Queenstown before she gets a job at a pub run by Bruno (Kiwi actor John Callen with an odd accent). Silvia charms the locals, particularly Bruno’s son Adam, by showing them magic tricks – we New Zealanders are simple folk – and tries to clean up the inevitable fallout from messing with Ravn while seeking revenge for her father’s murder. There’s her ex-husband, a man of towering stupidity and illintent, to deal with. Plus a couple of fairly random Danish police officers on her trail. They want her to testify against Ravn and bring an end to what looks like his rather hapless reign of terror.
Straight Forward isn’t exactly Scandi noir. Much of it is set in Queenstown, but it’s not Top of the Lake, either. In fact, the production has all the atmosphere of, and is about as scary as, an Air New Zealand in-flight safety video.
There is a certain entertainment to be had out of watching Mitchinson find new ways to deliver variations on pretty much the same lines: “Find these women!”; “Find out where this bitch is!”, etc. The dialogue is generally a little mystifying. At one point, Silvia says to her bemused ex, “What a selfrighteous bitch you are!”
Still, here is where a viewer can learn the Danish for “the reception’s crap” while trying to figure out what exactly is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The acting style involves a lot of over-the-top mugging. If you had a drink every time someone throws a mobile phone onto the floor, into the lake or out a car window – the cast is clearly as exasperated with the script as we are – the whole thing would be considerably more fun. There is, however, some enigmatic thriller wisdom to be gleaned. “You don’t chase a rabbit that gives itself up,” declares someone. Well, you wouldn’t.
Possibly in order to justify the location, characters spend a lot of time talking to each other outside on benches strategically placed so we can admire the scenery. Or as Adam tells Silvia, “We talk, laugh, look at the view. I mean, why wouldn’t you?” Pause while we all gawp at the lake.
Ida gets briefly kidnapped. Silvia feels briefly guilty for leaving her daughter in harm’s way awaiting a fake passport while she swans off to New Zealand. Though it’s not safe here at the ends of the Earth, either, she finds. It turns out that the view includes the place where Adam’s wife, Cathy, was killed as a result of being run down by a boy on a mountain bike.
Will any of these random events cohere into a good thriller plot? Will the series’ tagline – “How far will she go to protect her family?” – produce an answer more interesting than “Queenstown”? I suppose it says something about the show’s distinctly odd charms that I now feel obliged to wade through the rest of the eight episodes to find out. STRAIGHT FORWARD, TVNZ 1, Sunday, 9.45pm.