McMafia finally makes the grade as a jet-setting drama: episode eight review
So now we know: absolute power corrupts absolutely. The absorbing finale of McMafia (BBC One) fast-tracked Alex Godman (James Norton) to the pole position of apex predator. What has often looked like an accidental flirtation with criminality was transformed into the real thing. Butter practically froze in Alex’s mouth as he made his chilling pitch. Godman by name, by nature not so much.
McMafia was billed as a finessed slice of deeply researched nonfiction. But it also had to make the grade as jet-setting drama. To massage up the pulse rate the script sometimes played God: when Alex sent his bodyguard away at the wrong moment, say, or when creepy Antonio (Caio Blat) turned up just as Rebecca was (miraculously) discharged from hospital.
Other corners were cut. When did Alex find time to type up that fat contractual document? What did the police do about the body in Rebecca’s pad? What the hell happened to Femi’s lines? On the plus side, Alex’s implausible struggles with Russian, the cause of much vexing bilingual dialogue, finally proved useful when he heard his death sentence pronounced, triggering a hectic chase sequence which injected a welcome late burst of pace.
McMafia grid
If this was James Norton’s audition for 007, he wore the suit and pulled the trigger efficiently. But who could root for such a cold fish? The vanilla romance with his weepily credulous fiancée Rebecca (Juliet Rylance) made it difficult to credit the stricken look which flitted across his hardening face in the final shot. Having bid a sentimental farewell to conscience in his high-rise childhood home, it was no more bother for Alex to ignore Rebecca than to cut Antonio (the latter a most satisfying comeuppance).
McMafia: the real criminals who inspired the BBC drama
What made McMafia really sing was Alex’s Oedipal tussle with his father and his rival. There was always the temptation to wish a plague on both their houses, but Merab Ninidze as mobster Vadim and Aleksey Serebryakov as papa Dimitri exuded such fiery intensity that it was impossible not to be stirred by their doom. They at least weren’t anaemic economists, unlike Alex and his new technocratic partners in crime. According this enlightening if cheerless fable, the boring men in suits will inherit the earth. Heaven help us all.