Firess Dirani and Brian Cox star in ABC's The Straits. Source: Supplied
Graeme Blundell, The Australian, reports
After a slowish if still diverting start, this classy new crime series set in the magical, tropical north has really picked up speed.
It's the story of a kind of average Australian family who happen to be modern-day smugglers. Their business, run from Cairns, is transporting drugs into the far north of Australia and moving guns and exotic wildlife out, making use of their extensive ties of blood and hard-won loyalty in the islands.
Harry Montebello, played with great skill and empathy by British actor Brian Cox, is the family patriarch. He's of Maltese extraction and once ran with the gangs in his home town of London. Escaping his gangster father's influence, he came to Australia to work the prawn trawlers and married the exotic Kitty (Rena Owen), born in the Strait to an Islander woman and Maori father.
Unable to bear children, and using the generous traditions of Islander adoption, she and her husband took in Noel and Marou (Aaron Fa'Aoso and Jimi Bani) from her extended family. Later they were joined by Gary (Firass Dirani), the orphan son of Harry's cousin, and Sissi (Suzannah Bayes-Morton), their PNG housemaid's daughter.
At the start of the series Harry put his children to the test, to establish who is best capable of running the family business when he's gone.
And in doing so this hard man, so adept at maintaining order, set his family on a slide into chaos. Tonight he's still lying in hospital, shot by a hired assassin who was himself killed by his sons, who feed his body to the crocodiles in the family wildlife farm.
Noel has also blown up the clubhouse of the DC Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, killing the outfit's president in the process. Tonight it's still unravelling. Noel's siblings are angry with his "crash or crash through" style.
It's enthralling; The Straits is our first gangster western. It rivals anything of the sort being turned by the big US cable production houses.
The Straits, Thursday 8.30pm, ABC1
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