After an underwhelming series 3, which suffered from lack of story, this should have been a massive return to form. There's nothing but great material - Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine, Nellie Cameron, dodgy coppers - plus everyone is dead so they didn't have to worry about lawsuits.
But it doesn't work. There's no central powering narrative like Carl Williams' rise and fall - they try to focus it on the rivalry between Kate and Tilly but that hits the same note over and over ("they argued", "they argued") and doesn't build to anything... the two point guns at each other at the end and don't go through with it. There's a lot of repetition eg Jeremy Lindsay Taylor gets beaten up again and again and again; people keep getting shot and surviving; Kate Leigh yelling at people, and a lot of needless confusion, eg an inability how Norman Bruhn's plan worked. Lot of it comes across as just silly (singers performing old versions of 1980s songs), the foreign country accents seem fake and there's a disappointing oversimplification of history and lack of character development, which you can understand when the real people are alive and can't be defamed but here they are all dead.
Some of it is good - Danielle Cormack's Tilly; Jack Campbell's Big Jim Devine; John Bachelor; Khan Chittendon. There are some very effective moments, such as the rape episode and the cocaine dealing dentists. But too many of the cast are simply not up to their roles - Graeme Blundell fails to convey the power of Jack Lang; Chelsie Preston Crayford is terrible; and Anna McGahan can't quite pull off the enigmatic depths of Nellie Cameron. I don't know what happened, but this was terribly disappointing.
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