Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie Review

Jack of Many Trades

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 31, 2013

Guy Pearce began acting professionally on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, but his successful movie career took him away from the small screen Down Under and kept him in theaters after his breakthrough role as Lt. Ed Exley in L.A. Confidential (1997). His return to his Aussie television roots in 2012 was a major event, not the least because of the role that drew him back. Jack Irish, the hero of four detective novels by author Peter Temple (with a fifth in progress), is a popular figure in Australia, in large part because he's such an original. A drinker and gambler, a former winner brought low by tragedy for whom every day is another chance either to fail or to reinvent himself, Jack isn't even a detective by trade. He just seems to fall into mysteries, which he ends up solving almost as a sideline. In many ways, he's a morose variation of The Big Lebowski's Dude, except that Jack is still looking for something to tie his room (and life) together.

Temple's labyrinthine novels Bad Debts and Black Tide were transformed into densely layered scripts by writers Andrew Knight and Matt Cameron, respectively, each of whom labored to balance Temple's peculiar mix of atmosphere, crime story and character exploration. As Knight observes in the short documentary included on the Blu-ray, the character portion was aided by Pearce, who conveys much of Jack Irish's troubled inner world just in the way he stands, moves and surveys a room. Pearce's best performances have always been as damaged individuals in films like Memento, The King's Speech or The Proposition. He and Jack Irish were made for each other.

“And was there collusion amongst these condiments?”

Bad Debts (first broadcast: Oct. 14, 2012, Australia)

A brief prologue provides a glimpse of Jack Irish (Pearce) in better times, when he was a sharply dressed and successful lawyer in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne. That life ended abruptly one evening, with the tragic death of his wife, Isabel (Emma Booth), under circumstances for which Jack blames himself.

Some time later, Jack is scruffier, less focused and more casually attired. When asked his occupation, he says "I live off my wits". Indeed, Jack's life seems to be a random collection of activities that he picks up and puts down as if he were trying on different outfits. He's a debt collector who relies not on muscle, but on insight and experience about where people hide their cash. His collection activities are part of his role as assistant to a friend and professional gambler, Harry Strang (Roy Billing), an expert on horses and jockeys, who travels from track to track with his driver, Cam Delray (Aaron Pedersen). Under Harry's direction, Cam and Jack place strategic bets to jigger the odds, until Harry has his favorite horse properly positioned for just the right score.

Occasionally, Jack checks in with his old law colleague, Drew Geer (Damien Richardson), who looks hopeful that Jack might come back to work. But Jack is always off to other pursuits, of which perhaps the most intriguing is an on-again, off-again apprenticeship to a master cabinetmaker, an elderly German named Charlie Taub (Vadim Glowna). A soft-spoken curmudgeon, Charlie conceals his affection for Jack under a stream of criticism. He is given to Miyagi-like pronouncements that sound like profound truths ("Until you make something nice out of it, it's only a piece of wood!"). If asked, however, he'd say he was just discussing his craft. Go back and watch the opening scene, and you'll notice that Jack's last conversation with Isabel before she died concerned her interest in acquiring a hand-crafted wood table for their home. Maybe Charlie senses the connection. (Bad Debts is dedicated to Glowna, who died shortly after filming all his scenes for this and Black Tide.)

Whenever the opportunity arises, Jack can be found in his local pub, the Prince of Prussia, where time seems to have stood still, and a trio of ancient "Australian rules football" fans, Norm, Wilbur and Eric (Ron Falk, John Flaus and Terry Norris), remain glued to their seats, celebrating the glory days of the Fitzroy Lions, the team for which Jack's father played as a young man, before the sad day when the Lions fell on hard times and merged with a team in Brisbane. The pub is Jack's second office and home away from home.

A series of voicemail messages from a former client, Danny McKillop (Simon Russell), interrupts Jack's routine (if you can call it that). McKillop wants to see Jack, but before Jack can find him, McKillop turns up dead, shot by police in a parking lot, where, according to the cops, he drew a gun on them. Jack doesn't buy it. Danny was recently released from prison after Jack failed to get him off on a charge of killing a woman in a hit-and-run while driving drunk. Danny couldn't remember anything, but the case had interesting dimensions. The victim was an activist campaigning against a huge housing development, which, after her death went forward without a snag. A lot of money was made, and behind the customary disguise of shell corporations and offshore accounts, much of it went to powerful people in business, politics and the clergy.

There's never much doubt who the villains are in Bad Debts. Corruption practically oozes from their pores. The question is how they accomplished their deals, and why Danny McKillop had to die. Major assistance is provided by a reporter who covered the original story, Linda Hillier (Marta Dusseldorp), a boldly inquisitive professional with a tart tongue and quick mind. When Jack invites her to dinner, Linda quickly commandeers the table, drawing on the linen, rearranging the condiments, even borrowing additional supplies from neighboring diners, to illustrate for Jack the complexity of the real estate deal they are investigating. It's one of Bad Debts's best scenes, because it's both exposition and foreplay. (Jack's and Linda's first session in bed would be frank by the standards of American film, let alone American TV.)

Reinvestigating the ten-year-old case, Jack wants to interview the eyewitness to the crime, Ronald Bishop (Drew Tingwell). He has gone on the run, but he left something with his mother (Judi Farr), which he told her to keep safe: the CD of an album by Nat King Cole. Jack examines it, listens to it and can't find anything unusual. The CD will pass through many hands before anyone notices something odd, and the clever fellow turns out to be one of the geezers at The Prince of Prussia. It's precisely the kind of quirky detail that makes Jack Irish a unique creation.




Black Tide (first broadcast: Oct 21, 2012, Australia)

Jack's and Linda's relationship has soured for reasons that are gradually revealed during Black Tide. Is it any surprise, though, that Jack has problems getting close to another woman when he's still grieving for his wife?

Jack's immediate problem, however, is the reappearance of a former teammate of his father named Des Connors (Ronald Jacobson), who wants some estate planning work. In the course of telling Jack who should get his property, however, he mentions that his son, Gary (Nicholas Coghlan), owes him $60,000. Since Jack has experience as a debt collector, and Des's connection to Jack's father makes him special, Jack offers to recover the money.

As we already know, Gary is not your ordinary prodigal son. In a pre-credit sequence, we've seen him detained at the Bangkok airport for drug smuggling and questioned by an Australian federal agent named Dean Cannetti (Lachy Hulme). Cannetti gives Gary a choice: either spend twenty years in a Thai jail or turn informant. Cannetti is after a big fish named Steve Levesque (Martin Sacks), a tycoon and "kingmaker" who heads a company called Transquik. Gary Connors records a video statement and heads back home, but thereafter events are unclear. Several people die, others disappear, and a lot of unanswered questions remain.

Jack no longer has Linda's assistance, but his former law partner Bruce connects him with a researcher, Simone (Susan Atkinson), who isn't exactly Lisbeth Salander, but talks fast, knows computers and has dating dilemmas that are grist for Jack's mordant sense of humor. With Simone's help, Jack discovers that Gary Connors was employed by a sister company of Transquik and goes searching for a blogger named Simon, who claims to have the goods on Transquik and Levesque. He doesn't find Simon, who disappears for months at a time, but he does find Simon's housemate, a photojournalist named Lyall (Diana Glenn), to whom Jack is very appealing indeed.

Levesque's connections reach to the very top of the government. Simone finds evidence that the Attorney General himself may be protecting him, and Levesque's organization is staffed with ex-military and other muscle. The more Jack pokes around the edges of Levesque and Transquik, the more forcefully he's warned off. The sole offer of assistance comes from a federal agent who gives his name as "Dave" (Don Hany) and provides useful information, but only up to a point.

On the horse racing side of the ledger, Jack's betting activities with Harry Strang and Cam Delray hit a snag in the person of Ricky Kirsch (Neil Melville), a flamboyant gambler who has adopted Harry's game of manipulating payouts from horse races, but has taken it much further. Too impatient to study the horses and the jockeys, then tilt the odds in his favor, Kirsch simply intimidates the jockeys into throwing races. One jockey who didn't tow the line met with a fatal accident. At Harry's urging, Jack deals with Kirsch by calling in a favor from a psychotic former client, who would literally cut off a man's private parts in gratitude to Jack Irish.

At the pub, a civil war is brewing, because owner and barkeep Stan (Damien Garvey) has received a lucrative offer from a fancy club in Brisbane, the present home of what remains of the Fitzroy Lions, for all the photographs and memorabilia currently adorning the bar at the Prince of Prussia. Pub regulars Norm, Wilbur and Eric are outraged that Stan would even consider selling. The Fitzroy Lions were a local team! Mementos of their exploits belong here. Jack's usual refuge becomes what Jack calls "a Mexican standoff", and he has to tread lightly.

Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cinematographer Martin McGrath (Muriel's Wedding) shot both installments of Jack Irish with the Arri Alexa, and the image on Acorn Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray demonstrates all the usual virtues of that camera's capabilities, with sharp focus, noiseless reproduction of fine detail and a film-like but grainless texture without any of the digital harshness sometimes seen in early HD cameras. Since Jack Irish is not a period piece, the post-production digital grading has stuck with mostly naturalistic colors and ordinary fleshtones. Exceptions occur in certain night scenes, where blues and grays have been emphasized to create a contemporary hint of film noir. In general, though, McGrath and director Walker prefer to get their atmosphere from the characters and their surroundings in some of the seedier urban locales they've selected in and around Melbourne.

With both Jack Irish TV movies on a single BD-50, the combined bitrate clocks in at 21.07 Mbps, which is fairly generous for Acorn's recent releases of digitally originated material. Given the lack of film grain to challenge the compressionist and the fact that Jack Irish has relatively few action scenes (although the ones that it has are effectively staged), it's a good enough rate to avoid compression artifacts.

Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Jack Irish has a stereo soundtrack presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, which provides a fair degree of ambiance when played through a surround decoder. The sound editing has some intense moments, especially in several incidents of tense pursuit in Bad Debts and one of assault in Black Tide, but the two-channel format precludes any specific rear-channel effects. The musical score by Harry James Angus plays with good fidelity, and the title song, "Red Right Hand", performed by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, sets the perfect tone for the series.

The dialogue is no doubt clear and distinct to Australian ears, but it's heavily accented and filled with local slang. One doesn't needs to understand every word to follow the plot, but if you're having trouble catching every exchange, it's not you. Switch on the subtitles as needed.

Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Jack Irish: Behind the Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 16:52): Featuring interviews with Pearce, director Jeff Walker, screenwriter Andrew Wright and various producers, department heads and other personnel, this short documentary provides a good overview of the making of the two installments to date and the determination of all involved to "get it right". One interesting point is that the two installments were filmed simultaneously, so that Pearce found himself relying on Walker to remind him, from day to day, which story he was in.



• Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Acorn Media, Jack Taylor and Falcón, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Jack Irish: Series 1 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As of this writing, principal photography has already wrapped on Jack Irish: Dead Point, and an adaptation of Temple's fourth novel, White Dog, is reportedly in the works. With no imminent shortage of greedy schemers, colorful but shady characters and loyalty to the Fitzroy Lions, there should be plenty of possibilities for Jack to apply his special talents while groping his way back to some semblance of spiritual health. I look forward to his future efforts. Highly recommended.