Review – Small Time Gangster

Small Time Gangster – Movie Extra – 8:30pm Tuesday – AUS

There’s a sub-genre in the Australian film industry all about ‘low-rent crims’, that at its best delivers films like Animal Kingdom or Chopper, and the rest of the time delivers films like The Boys or Gettin’ Square or Idiot Box or Dirty Deeds. Underbelly transformed this world into massive ratings success by adopting the flashy editing and unique feel of Chopper, and Small Time Gangster is here to emulate the dirty look of The Boys and Idiot Box.

Small Time Gangster debuts tonight on Movie Extra, and is that channel’s second foray in producing their own series after 2009’s often hilarious The Jesters. Small Time Gangster is almost the polar opposite to that inside showbiz satire. There are no big broad gags here, there’s just small time crims, some dirty work that somebody’s gotta do and some dark comedy. The small time gangster of the title is Tony Piccolo (Steve Le Marquand) an ordinary Aussie bloke who roughs people up when they don’t pay the debts they owe to big boss man Barry (Gary Sweet).

The first episode takes place on Christmas Day with Tony returning home after beating up a couple of drug dealers who wouldn’t pay up. Tony comes home to his wife Cathy (Sacha Horler), dresses up as Santa Clause and she’s about to go down on him when – oh oh! – their two kids and Grandpa walk into the room. “What are you doing down there?” One of them asks. “Oh gross!” Another yells out. This is the comedy part of the dark comedy, people, so chuckle your guts out while you get the opportunity.

Tony’s next big job is to get some cash out of Artie, a guy who is also part of Barry’s organization. Tony doesn’t feel comfortable roughing up a guy he’s worked with but as Tony tries to reason with Artie, Artie steps back in front of an ice-cream van which eventually leads to his death. So even though Tony is one of those nice guy criminals everybody starts to believe he’s a cold blooded killer. It even gets back to Barry who decides he wants his son to follow Tony around and learn the ropes. But what will Tony do? He’s not a cold blooded killer! He’s a family man!

What doesn’t work about Small Time Gangster is this ridiculous notion that Tony is some kind of bumbling innocent who looks shitscared and dumbfounded whenever Barry offers him a tougher assignment. It’s established early on that Tony has worked for the organization for TWENTY YEARS. His first scene involves him bounding up an innocent woman with gaffer tape and beating the shit out of two drug dealers. At what point did he stop being a criminal who knows what he’s doing and transform into the main character of a Chris Kattan film?

The biggest problem with the series though is that we have seen all this before so many times now that it’s not even funny. It’s hardly a refreshing take on the Australian underworld to make Tony a man who has a family, or to make this a dark comedy with wacky deaths, or name the big boss man Barry, or to have Gary Sweet star in it, or to drown all the colour from every frame so everything is brown and dusty. The final scene of the opening episode even has Tony walk through his family home in slow motion before dropping face first into the swimming pool and float there like so many protagonists of so many shitty indie films before him.

Small Time Gangster is like Outrageous Fortune without the sense of fun. It isn’t exactly bad, per se, it’s just we’ve seen everything on screen elsewhere that there’s really no point in this existing. Maybe it’s not that Small Time Gangster is unoriginal, maybe it’s just that there is just nothing left to say about Aussie working class criminals. When there are so many films and TV shows that cover this territory and do it better than Small Time Gangster there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t just rent them instead of watching this. 

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad