Mr Inbetween: review

Scott Ryan as Ray Shoesmith (the grin is one of the last things you'll ever see)

Mr Inbetween* is an Australian series that went on for three seasons, from 2018 to 2021—roughly the pandemic years. It was written and co-produced by actor/writer Scott Ryan, who stars in the show and writes every episode. Every episode of this crime dramedy is also directed by Nash Edgerton, the older brother of actor Joel Edgerton. The series is a gripping serialization of a feature film from 2005 called The Magician, which has the same main character (Scott Ryan again) but is done as a hand-held camera documentary (doco in Aussie slang). I haven't seen The Magician yet, but if I find it, I might give it a look. Based on what I know about the movie and what I've seen in the TV series, the two stories have substantially different endings, so I wonder if Mr Inbetween should be thought of as a reboot. Maybe.

The eponymous Magician (not named as such until Season 3), and the focus of the series, is Ray Shoesmith (Ryan), a bald hitman with a strangely strict set of morals that are always at war with his highly compartmentalized brain. When Ray kills, it's "just business," and if he gets a job that entails killing someone he considers a friend (or a friendly acquaintance), he generally won't think twice about doing the work. Ray has other contradictions as well: He always reins in his temper around the women and girls who are closest to him, but he can be easily set off by men who disrespect him, or who unnecessarily act like assholes (in Oz, folks are apparently much more likely to say dickhead, the Aussie answer to the British equivalent bellend). While Ray never gets openly furious at the ladies in his life, he does sometimes lose his cool in front of them. Ray also walks between two worlds: the seedy underworld where there's no end of people needing killing, and the more pedestrian world of his ex-wife Jacinta (Natalie Tran) and tween daughter (a very gap-toothed Chika Yasumura). Ray's brother Bruce (Nicholas Cassim) is afflicted with ALS (known in Oz as MND, or motor-neurone disease); his health is rapidly deteriorating, and although he shares Ray's dark sense of humor, Bruce is edging closer to wanting to die before he becomes totally immobile. Ray's friends all tend to be seedy people like Ray himself. His best friend is sex-addict Gary Thomas (Justin Rosniak), who's into golden-shower porn, foot-shaped sex toys, and other kinks. Ray does what he can to keep the darker aspects of his life from bleeding over into his family life, but he's not always successful. Ray's boss is Freddy (Damon Herriman), who runs a nightclub where Ray works as a bouncer, and who gives Ray his various assignments. Ray also gets a girlfriend in Season 1, a woman named Ally (Brooke Satchwell), who works as a paramedic (Aussie slang: ambo).

When Ray has to kill people, and he's driving them to a remote spot to be topped, he can often become almost friendly, asking his victims personal questions or, if he knows his victims well, chatting about old times before taking them out of the car for their final moments ("See you in your dreams," says one old friend). But Ray has no tolerance for certain types of criminal, such as child traffickers. In one episode, we see Ray start to murder a group of traffickers before the basement door closes, blocking our view of the violence. And while Ray does what he can to avoid trouble with the law, he does hit one asshole (sorry—dickhead) and end up in jail for a few days until a friend "persuades" the assault victim to drop all charges.

With his creepy, predatory, Willem Dafoe smile, his cold stare, and his generally calm competence, Scott Ryan is the perfect Ray Shoesmith, a tangle of contradictions. Family man, friend of a perv, hitman for hire, befriender of fellow assassins, Ray occupies a weirdly liminal middle ground and is himself the locus at which his opposite tendencies meet. Only his ability to keep his thoughts and feelings compartmentalized prevents his various disparate worlds from crashing into each other, and one of the big questions haunting the entire series is whether the people in his "normal" life will ever find out what he really does for a living. (Ray usually tells people that he's in "security," alluding to his work as a part-time bouncer.) This is an especially delicate question for Ray and his daughter Brittany ("Britt"), who discovers one of Ray's guns in Season 3 and accidentally fires it inside Ray's house.

Part of Mr Inbetween's charms lies in how well acted it is. Chika Yasumura as daughter Britt starts to grow into a young woman as the show progresses over three or four years; she's a mouthy pre-teen giving Ray a lot of grief by the final season, and Ray has to tell her that he's tired of fighting her. For a child actress, Yasumura is just about pitch-perfect. The hilarious Justin Rosniak plays Gary as pervy and smarmy Gary, eventually finding work as a porn-video director but still proving to be a truly loyal friend to Ray, sometimes helping Ray out on some of his jobs (and receiving a cut of Ray's cash payments). But just as often desperately begs Ray for help as his porn addiction and sexual proclivities get him in trouble with his strict, imperious Russian wife Tatiana (Lizzie Schebesta), who ends up leaving Gary for another woman.  Rosniak is one of the main sources of comic relief. Damon Herriman as boss Freddy is hard to read (and deliberately so): Will he eventually fuck Ray over, or are he and Ray good enough friends to move past various differences and betrayals? Matt Nable, as stoic fellow hitman Dave, is spared by Ray after having been paid to kill him—a demonstration of Ray's understanding that none of this is personal. But in sparing Dave, Ray makes a fast friend, and the two do some operations together.

Another thing to like about Mr Inbetween is the understated nature of Ray's viciousness. Ray is most likely to explode into violence when he's with a target or confronting an enemy who deserves to die; otherwise, he's normally a calm bloke. But Ray, who has army training, and who suffered abuse from his now-aged father Bill (Kenny Graham), isn't portrayed as a cartoonishly precise assassin like Keanu Reeves's John Wick, or a ruthlessly vicious fighter like Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer, or a coldly calculating death machine like Denzel Washington's Robert McCall. Ray moves deliberately and strategically, mainly relying on luck, a bit of strategy, a knowledge of human nature, and plain common sense. He's not the best fighter in town, a fact that's emphasized when he challenges one of his young female students in a boxing gym to take him down with her Brazilian jiujitsu knowledge, which she does, choking Ray into unconsciousness because he refuses to tap out.  But Ray doesn't have an ego about his loss to his student, and he ends up asking her for help when a girl at school starts to bully his daughter Britt (Ray had tried talking to the mother; predictably, she called him a dickhead while threatening to sic her supposed policeman brother on him—a threat with no substance to it). Ray's student, meanwhile, finds the bully at school and threatens to rip her head off, which takes care of that problem.

The overall plot arc of Mr Inbetween doesn't build up to anything; the entire show is more a slice-of-life comedy-drama. The invested viewer will have questions as to who will die by the end: Will Gary? Will Dave? Will Ray's family? And what will eventually become of Ray, who is becoming less and less successful at keeping the darker side of his life away from his family? For a series about a hitman, the violence and action aren't constantly in your face; mostly, the show is about human moments—interacting with an increasingly surly daughter, dealing with the circumspect ex-wife, handling a girlfriend's fear of Ray because her previous boyfriend had been violent, grudgingly reconciling with his abusive war-veteran father. Ray's brother Bruce, early on, asks whether Ray will help him die when Bruce feels the time is right; Ray hesitates to answer yes at first because he truly loves his brother. But when the moment comes, Ray is there to help Bruce, and this has to be one of the saddest, most touching moments in the whole show. Watching anyone with neurological difficulties is hard for me, and the death of Bruce left me with a lump in my throat. Hats off to Nicholas Cassim for an authentic, and authentically depressing, portrayal of ALS.

In terms of political worldviews, Ray (and his friend Gary) seems to lean more conservative. He doesn't believe that being meek and mild pays off: All that does is motivate people to walk all over you. Ray's philosophy is: If you can't make people respect you, make them fear you. Otherwise, if people treat you with respect, treat them with respect. Ray isn't a superhero out to protect the innocent; there are a few victims of his who probably didn't deserve to die, but they were late with payments or had committed some other kind of low-grade offense. But Ray does have a code of sorts, and it aligns with a species of amorality that activates whenever he's on a job. And while Ray is willing to kill certain longtime friends if the money's right (nothing personal), he wouldn't think of harming the people who are closest to him: his daughter, Gary, his brother Bruce, his girlfriend, his ex-wife, or even a war buddy.

So the characters in Mr Inbetween are complex, dimensional, and well written. And honestly, I can't think of a single complaint I have about the series, although I do have to wonder whether the Australian police will ever catch on to the amount of killing and grave-digging and car-burning that Ray does. If Ray were ever to get caught, he'd probably end up serving several life terms for all of his crimes. The series does manage to end on a note that is simultaneously comical and sinister, very much in the spirit of any number of Tarantino films, which usually mix the humorous and the horrific, leaving the audience unsure how to react. In fact, you can probably think of Mr Inbetween as a three-season-long Tarantino film. It's got the occasional bursts of violence and gore, the well-written characters, the lively clashes of attitudes and perspectives, and above all, the random and unpredictable twists of fate that can alter personal trajectories permanently—like when a suddenly appearing kangaroo causes a car crash in the Outback during a drug run.

I highly, highly, highly recommend the well-acted, well-plotted, well-written Mr Inbetween. If this is an example of the quality of modern Australian TV, then I ought to seek out more Aussie material. The series is a fun, riveting watch—very binge-worthy. The show is also a great resource for Aussie slang and turns of phrase, like dimmie (from dim sum) for Aussie-style Chinese-ish dumplings, dunny for toilet (I already knew that one), Jack or dog for cop or informant, He topped himself for He killed himself, the nickname Gazza for Gary, etc. Watch this magnificent—and all-too-short—series with my enthusiastic blessing.

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*In UK, Aussie, and NZ English, you don't normally put a period after abbreviations like Mr, Mrs, Ms, and Dr. Something for my American readers to remember: We Yanks do use periods. Don't pretend you are who you are not. Remember what country you come from. Neither style is wrong from an objective standpoint, but each style is proper to a particular culture. If you don't belong to that culture, don't ape its style with the technical stuff. That's pretentious, and Ray Shoesmith would probably kill you for your presumptuousness.