The Westies review – this violent New York mob drama is like Peaky Blinders meets The Sopranos
Expect bloody chaos in this drama about a real-life 80s Irish-American gang – featuring JK Simmons as a gang leader – and their dealings with an Italian-American crime family
The Peaky Blinders effect lingers on. More than a decade after Tommy Shelby’s debut, TV still loves a real-life gangster crew, especially with Blinders creator Steven Knight having recently repeated the based-on-truth trick with A Thousand Blows. What other IRL historical crime crews are still available? All this time, the Westies, an Irish-American gang operating in 1980s New York in a fractious alliance with the Italian-American Gambino crime family, were right there. It’s the Irish mafia and the actual mafia in a two-for-one deal.
Along with co-creator Michael Panes, the man to score this apparent open goal by making Peaky Sopranos is Chris Brancato, a showrunner whose resume includes Narcos and the quietly excellent Godfather of Harlem. With some sturdy players in the cast, The Westies is … OK. It’s fine. It’s good! Whaddaya want from me, uh? I said it was fine.
JK Simmons is Eamon Sweeney, the Westies leader. Sweeney operates out of a portable cabin on a Hell’s Kitchen building site, because – as he helpfully explains near the start of episode one, to an underling who surely knows this already – he has brokered a deal under which his Irish crew, not the much more powerful Italians, have a piece of a million-dollar construction project. To keep the kickbacks flowing, Sweeney has to keep the Gambinos sweet.
Two problems with that: the young Irish-Americans who work as Sweeney’s footsoldiers are violent, impulsive drunkards, and the equivalent Italians are violent and impulsive whether or not they have been on the vino. Emerging from the bloody chaos that inevitably results are two potential new leaders. On the Italian side is future mafia superstar John Gotti (Hamish Allan-Headley), who doesn’t see why he should accommodate the Irish at all. For the Irish, Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney, scarcely recognisable as the bloke who played the hot vicar in Grantchester) is Sweeney’s brightest lieutenant, but is pulling in a different direction from his boss and is loyal most of all to his pal Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan), a big-hearted but unstable Vietnam vet who starts the action strapped to a bed, receiving electroconvulsive therapy. While he’s away, Mickey misses the memo about not messing with the Italians.
In the main characters’ orbits are NYPD officer Glenn Keenan, a weak-willed gambler and drinker played by a magnificently coiffured Titus Welliver, whose receding silver bouffant and black moustache give him the aspect of a black-and-white photo of a depressed cockatoo; and Jimmy’s girlfriend Bridget Walsh (Sarah Bolger), a wise sounding-board who helps out with Westies business but is more concerned with fighting for Irish liberation, a cause she used to advance in person but now campaigns for remotely. When her old boyfriend Brendan Cahill (Allen Leech) turns up asking a favour, Bridget has to decide whether to get involved again.
The show has an interest in fathers and sons, most obviously in the story of Keenan, a lost widower who forlornly tries to stop his teenaged son, Danny (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), being drawn into the Westies way of life. That Sweeney has no children may turn out to be his downfall, since his instinct to find a surrogate son in Jimmy is no substitute for the real thing.
The Westies is at its best when indulging the guiltier pleasures of the mob genre, as it plays punch-ups for laughs and enjoys riding with the Roarke brotherhood when they’re half-cut and implementing terrible plans. A run of questionable decisions leads to a brilliantly unpleasant corpse dismemberment scene in a butcher shop’s back-room, followed by an extended caper with a severed hand; the lads’ surveillance of a night club where Colombians are hiding their cocaine-dealing HQ – coke being the line of business that will be seized on by a new generation of mobsters, who will push their elders aside to claim the fresh riches – climaxes with naughtily over-the-top violence.
The more serious moments are where The Westies can’t distinguish itself. Simmons brings an expectation of imperiousness that never quite arrives, his effort to give Sweeney a soft, weary edge, robbing the boss of the fearsomeness he needs. Allan-Headley, meanwhile, really struggles to advance Gotti from an ambitious young Mafiosi: there’s no dread when he invites you to sit down at a restaurant table with a red-and-white-checked cloth so he can break your balls, because we’ve seen this guy before. Welliver’s compromised cop Keenan is just too pathetic and tired to bother with. Too many of the supporting players are either stereotypes or blanks.
The only cast members with the energy that comes from being sure of their characters are Brittney and Bolger. He gives Roarke a good mix of idealism and smarts, while she makes Walsh equal parts steely and nervy. They’re excellent; but too much of The Westies is just competent.
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