Review by C.J. Bunce
Usually crime dramas do their part in creating a reasonably interesting crime, populated with some interesting criminals, then good guys come in to bring them to justice. Usually these shows are better if the details of the personal lives of the good guys are not incorporated into the plot. Law & Order is a good example of the crime drama done exactly right. We never once saw Jack McCoy or Lennie Brisco at home. And thank goodness. A new HBO crime drama mini-series that just wrapped its final episode flips the script on this norm, but unfortunately it didn’t stick the landing.
Billed as a crime drama, the new mini-series Task qualifies if you stretch out the word draaaaama and don’t care about an interesting crime. But a solid performance by star Mark Ruffalo as an end-of-career FBI agent and foster father will likely keep you hanging in there until the end.
Ultimately telling the story of unlikeable criminals of the Deliverance woods variety, Mare of Easttown’s Brad Ingelsby attempts to show soulless bad guys as sympathetic and he fails to make the crime worthy of a series. But Ruffalo, who plays a beyond retirement age FBI agent named Tom Brandis, is a really good guy. In fact he’s the kind of character to use for an ongoing crime series. It’s just too bad the crime Ingelsby chose to address was this one, since this is a one-and-done season-long mini-series.
Old man trope alert: Brought back from more routine desk duties to form a task force with little support from the feds and a motley band of multi-jurisdictional law enforcement officers, Ruffalo’s agent Brandis is Old Man Ruffalo playing Old Man Agent, and he fits in these shoes quite well. The same absent-minded character he played in his two best and most famous roles–as a detective in Zodiac and as Bruce Banner in the Marvel movies–is hard to distinguish from the guy we see in this show (or Ruffalo as seen in interviews). Brandis and his now deceased wife once raised a daughter, then adopted a boy and girl who are now of high school age. Unfortunately the boy had schizophrenia, and when off his meds he killed his new mom. The series begins as Brandis and his two daughters are expected to create a statement in court about his son’s impending release. The finale ends with the reading of that statement, although the series should have stopped there. A denouement stretches out what could have been a nice ending.
Task handles the foster family subject well, if in a dark way, the opposite of the pristine and more optimistic (and realistic) handling found in the adaptation of the Marvel family comics in the movies Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Again, crime dramas usually relegate this kind of home life of the lead character to the background, maybe discussing home life in a few sentences over a season. If this was only a show about a family dealing with issues in a foster environment it would have been a home run, something like the 1997 Jena Malone film Ellen Foster. Unfortunately this is a crime drama, and the audience is left to limp through a boring crime when what you’ll really want to see are the scenes with Brandis at home. In total, it’s a head scratcher.
Two bits of the crime part of the show work: first is the performance of Emilia Jones as a young woman expected to care for her routinely abandoned niece and nephew (there’s that family theme overtaking the crime story again), and the other is a boy played by Ben Lewis Doherty who is left behind when his drug dealer parents are killed in a robbery. Maeve inherits the boy’s care, and that boy eventually ends up in the caring hands of Brandis. Only because this is draaaaama, the writer pulls the boy away from Brandis in the last scene. So this isn’t a “happily ever after.” For no real reason. Instead of rewarding the viewer for hanging on for seven long hours, we get a slap of dreary for the ending.
The crime parts are barely worth discussing. Jamie McShane, who dominates the dreary misunderstood guy role in shows like Longmire, Bosch, and Wednesday, finds his worst role to date here. It’s as skeezy and one note of a villain as you’ll find. Working for him is his match, Jayson with a Y, played by Sam Keeley, a dumb henchman hell bent on the trail of the guys who stole his drugs. Yawn.
The protagonist sharing equal time with Ruffalo is actually Maeve’s uncle, a disturbed trash collector who cases houses with his partner. Played by Iron Fist’s Tom Pelphrey (who should fire his agent) the character is vacuous (possibly from a life of drugs?) with no redeeming qualities, except the existence of his kids and niece Maeve.
That’s really all there is to say about the mini-series. If you have watched everything else, you might find your way to this show. Ruffalo completists won’t be too disappointed. And strong supporting players will keep you awake: Martha Plimpton is Brandis’ realistic boss (get her in more series, pronto!). Thuso Mbedo is the one cop on Brandis’s squad with any skills. And Sylvia Dionicio and Phoebe Fox play layered characters as Brandis’s daughters. Alison Oliver and Fabien Frankel play the other two members on Brandis’s task force. Unfortunately their characters are preposterous and predictable, and the characters key to the script taking a dive into oblivion. A mole in the task force is a good story twist that arrives too little, too late. Star Trek Voyager’s Raphael Sbarge plays another bad guy in the mix.
Task fits into the typical HBO drama mold like the network’s True Detective series. If that’s your thing, or you’re just a fan of Ruffalo, check it out. Otherwise you may want to give it a pass. All seven episodes of Task are now streaming on HBO.
