Taiwan Crime Stories’ second instalment is a definite improvement, but the jury is still out on the Disney+ thriller series
- Wang Po-chieh and Frederick Lee Ming-zhong star as a journalist and a cold-hearted criminal in the second instalment of Taiwan Crime Stories
- Meanwhile, on Apple+ TV’s The Mosquito Coast, Justin Theroux stars as Allie Fox, who continues to annoy drug cartels and governments as he moves his family off grid
Those who rushed to judgment on the Disney+ offering Taiwan Crime Stories might have been wiser to wait for it to develop before panning it. Or not.
Starring Rhydian Vaughan as police prosecutor Chen Lang-yu and Allison Lin Yu-xi as insurance company claims investigator Wen Qing-qiu, Derailment tells of two financially hamstrung brothers and their ailing father, all caught up, to varying degrees, in a train crash.
Debts have gone unpaid, and when blood suddenly appears in the water, as it were, the loan sharks strike.
A double life, an apparent betrayal and the inevitable cosying up again of former lovers Lang-yu and Qing-qiu might not always make for the most thrilling action, but the intrigue surrounding the case compensates for any lack of narrative pace.
At the time of writing, two of the four instalments (all in three parts, all based on real cases) had landed, giving viewers the opportunity to begin with the second, A Matter of Life and Death.
Starring Wang Po-chieh and Frederick Lee Ming-zhong, it is an unsparing look at violent crime as practised by ruthless gangs prepared to slaughter even women and children in their pursuit of money. It is also a thriller that recalls, in parts, the intensity of the best two-handers written for the stage.
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Wang is a journalist investigating the murder of a seemingly ordinary family years earlier; Lee is a cold-hearted criminal, an assassin languishing in prison, sentenced to death for various gangland murders. Wang demands the truth; Lee is evasive, dangling leads and dead-ends before him as he widens the picture of culpability.
A Matter of Life and Death maintains its fine balancing act throughout, confusing the viewer as to where their sympathies should lie as the two adversaries seem to switch personalities.
Instalments three and four of Taiwan Crime Stories (inspired by two more killings) have much to live up to. Then again, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are among the series’ executive producers – and they tend not to back many losers.
The coast is not clear
After a relatively slow start that occupied the entire first series, The Mosquito Coast has finally reached, well, the mosquito coast in season two of Allie Fox’s search for utopia (Apple TV+).
Idealistic dreamer and inventor Allie (Justin Theroux), appalled by consumerism, surveillance and other burgeoning plagues afflicting society, has taken his family to live in the rainforest that spills from Honduras into Nicaragua. Not that their relocation has been that simple.
Allie poked around on US government websites, where he wasn’t wanted; the Foxes also unwisely crossed a particularly vicious drug cartel on their hazardous dash through Mexico – both bad enough, but neither the real, shocking reason the family is on the run, which is finally revealed here.
The cartel’s merciless hitman, William Lee (Ian Hart), as insatiable as a piranha, refuses to be shaken off, and the fugitives now find themselves taking refuge in a riverbank commune populated by like-minded souls, some persecuted for defending ancestral lands or taking on ravenous corporations destroying the wilderness.
Unpredictable, resourceful, cunning but still generally benevolent, Allie can see his family becoming weary of his zeal, which threatens to jeopardise the community-in-hiding.
A small-man-versus-big-government adventure thriller, The Mosquito Coast resonates with our times – in which visionaries are humoured and tolerated up to the point at which they dare to challenge the “system”.
