Cat-and-mouse thriller Black Bird (Apple TV+, Friday) has acquired an accidental poignancy by dint of featuring the late Ray Liotta in his final screen role. The actor is reliably searing as the father of Taron Egerton’s Jimmy Keene, a college football star turned drug dealer. In fact, he’s a lot more convincing than Egerton, who looks pained throughout.
Perhaps Egerton is suffering flashbacks to acting opposite Bono in Sing 2. Or maybe he knows that, if nominally the lead in this gripping mini-series, from The Wire and Boardwalk Empire writer Dennis Lehane, his character is far less interesting than that of Black Bird’s villain, Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser).
Hall is a serial killer who targets teenage girls. We are introduced to him in flashbacks as detective Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) tries to connect Hall to a series of disappearances in the American midwest. The local cops fob off Miller by acknowledging that, if Hall is undoubtedly a weirdo, he is completely harmless. Yes, he has been accused of stalking local women. And he has admitted to violent fantasies. Does that really make him a potential murderer?
Miller reckons the answer is yes, absolutely. Yet when he sits down with the suspect he finds Hall’s slippery guilelessness a forcefield that it impossible to penetrate. He also understands that, unless he makes the charges stick, Hall will kill again.
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In the present day, Jimmy has his own problems. He’s been arrested for drug dealing and possession of firearms and, despite taking his father’s advice and admitting his guilt, is sentenced to a punitive 10 years.
However, it turns out the FBI is working an angle. They’ve put Hall temporarily behind bars. But without a confession he will walk – and kill again. Which is where Jimmy comes in. He’s a natural born charmer. Wangle a confession from Hall and that 10-year jail term will be written off.
Black Bird has such an outlandish premise it could only be based on a true story. Jimmy Keene is a real person and everything we see on screen more or less happened (and is recounted in Keene’s 2010 true-crime bestseller In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption).
Lehane is a bestselling novelist in his own right – his books include Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone and Live by Night – and knows what he’s doing as he piles on the tension. And if Egerton never convinces as a criminal backed into a corner, Hall is chilling as a murderer blissfully oblivious, or so it appears, to the evil sloshing about in his soul. Add Liotta’s moving cameo as a former cop ground down by life and you have a thriller that creeps under the skin to dazzling effect.
