‘Black Bird,’ another true-crime drama, is half-terror, half-autopilot – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
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The premise of the new psychological crime drama “Black Bird” might be brushed off as overly fanciful, if not downright hokey, were it not rooted in actual events: a convicted drug dealer (played by Taron Egerton) befriending a suspectedserial killer (Paul Walter Hauser) in prison to pry out the location of a victim’s remains in exchange for a commutation of his own 10-year sentence. (If he fails, the murderer will likely be released and continue to kill.)
Concocted by the FBI, the plan is so far-fetched that it earns the immediate scorn of a respected local cop (Greg Kinnear). “What you’re doing isn’t police work,” he tells the federal agent (Sepideh Moafi) coordinating the scheme. “It’s desperation.”
Adapted by novelist Dennis Lehane from James Keene’s memoir “In With the Devil,” the Apple limited series is the TV equivalent of a pair of dad jeans — a little dated, maybe a bit too comfortable in established patterns, but not giving up entirely on staying current. Set in the mid-1990s and in limited supply of the visual sleekness that distinguishes so much of Apple’s programming, it often looks and feels like a throwback. Hauser’s real-lifemurderer, Larry Hall, is such a cliche he comes with a creepy van — and an even creepier voice. High, thin and wheezy, his utterances make him sound as if his lungs have never gotten enough air.
In fact, that’s partly why the police in Larry’s Midwestern hometown initially dismiss him as a “serial confessor” — a “harmless weirdo” who grew up by a cemetery, dug graves as a kid to help support his parents and admitted to killing teenage girls so he could feel like a somebody. Within his family, too, he’s cast as the born loser — the twin whose nutrients were absorbed in the wombby his older brother. Gary (Jake McLaughlin) developed into a handsome, athletic boy who found it easy to attract girls. Larry followed them around in his van.
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Clearly (if competently) padded out into a six-hour drama with a movie’s worth of twists and turns, “Black Bird” is most compelling not as a psychological profile of a disturbed anomaly but as a study of societal failure — specifically, how Larry’s unsettling behavior toward girls in the town and his misogynistic views were excused or enabled by his protective family and overlooked by local law enforcement. (One of the cleverest gambits in Lehane’s scripts is that, while Larry’s actions represent the far edges of humanity, his idealization of young, “unspoiled” girls as sexual partners isn’t exactly a fringe view.) Mutton-chopped and pimply-faced, Larry knows just how to evoke pity from the more traditionally powerful men around him, posing as a simple-minded fantasist who can’t tell reality from his murder-filled dreams.
He is, however, smart enough to abduct girls in one state and leave their bodies in another, confounding detectives who are in the dark about similar cases in neighboring jurisdictions in Illinois,…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/07/08/black-bird-review-apple-tv-plus/
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