Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: James McArdle, Emun Elliott, Sarah Greene, Stephen Moyer, Tamsin Grieg, Eliza Bennett, John Dagleish, Paul Kaye, Clea Martin, Peter Ferdinando, Robbie Gee, Nicholas Nunn, Lex Shrapnel, Barry Castagnola, Stanley Morgan, Nitin Ganatra, David Kennedy, Cally Lawrence, Michael Obiora, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Clare Burt, Megan Morgan, Hannah van der Westhuysen, Nicola Wright, Ralph Brown, Andy Eadie, Javier Ramos.
There is a danger of turning a respected film into a field of debauched sentiment when adapted into a television prequel; that which made its presence known with fury can often be found to a soft introduction, the makers too weary to tread on the toes of what was to come, the cast found to be a pale imitation of that which roused the fire on the large screen.
If there was ever a series that lived up to the legend, then the eight-part drama of Sexy Beast is one of finest examples of what could be imagined when sticking to true course of the outcome and not bending to the furrowed idealism of producing a safe sense of entertainment.
If the character shows signs of displacement and delusion, of suffering from a complex form of PTSD in later life the chances are that they have had it since their formative years. In that very display of emotional wreckage, the sense of justice to the character of the brutal gangster Don Logan, perfectly framed by Ben Kingsley in the 2001 film, is given even greater determination by the reading of the man by Emun Elliott, and it is surely one of the finest depictions of the savagery and lost minds captured on British television.
Set in the turbulent world of 1980s Eastend London, Sexy Beast is ferocious, it is frighteningly animalistic and does little for the area it in habits; but that is the point, the east end of the city is historically one of violence and loyalty, of bloodshed and carnage, and yet before its eventual gentrification it had character, it is engrained in the national psyche that cruelty for some was a way of life, and Sexy Beast captures that with immensity of spirit and dynamic.
With terrific performances by Stephen Moyer, Tasmin Greig, Eliza Bennett, and Julian Rhind-Tutt, Sexy Beast is a force of television fit for the times we find ourselves in, a British series that does justice to the genre and one that is compelling watch.
Ian D. Hall