Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) goes through a journey to realize just what kind of person he is by the end of the excellent original Justified series after 6 more-than satisfying season, although his ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) tells him early in season one: he is the angriest man she has ever known. This concept burrows deep underneath the goings-on of Givens’s investigation in Justified: City Primeval, where Raylan this time hunts down a man who may be just as rage-fueled as he. Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook) finds himself at the business end of the Marshal’s service after he involves himself in the killing of a Detroit judge, Alvin Guy (Keith David), and his assistant Rose Doyle (Rae Gray).
After meeting Raylan for the first time in 2010 with the first season of Justified, we come to expect a kind of behavior from him that sets in motion a change of scenery, or as law enforcement in the TV medium call it, “punishment detail.” This isn’t so far off at the beginning of City Primeval. Raylan and his daughter Willa (Vivian Olyphant) embark on a road trip. Driving through their new home state of Florida, a car comes up from behind on a long stretch of highway and runs Givens and his daughter off the road. What happens next is nothing surprising as Raylan apprehends the perpetrators at gunpoint, ready to dispense the brand of justice he so freely did in Harlan County, Kentucky. But once his actions land him and Willa in trial for the questionable acts of violence applied to the situation, he starts to face the reality that what he got away with in Kentucky simply doesn’t fly in the metropolitan areas of Michigan or Florida.
What follows in the series is an entanglement of organized crime in Detroit with the Albanian mafia, a small outfit dubbed The Wrecking Crew, and Clement Mansell with his girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens), representing themselves as more or less free agents. Based on the number of moving parts this could easily have gotten bogged down with too many details or threads left unattended that could have been treated best with a full season’s worth of episodes. Yet the nature of Detroit’s totally corrupt police force take a lot of the legwork out of the equation for Raylan as he works alongside them. He makes no complaints when they brag about how they do things, but something in the way he sees it play out disturbs him. For Raylan it’s almost like a window to the past, seeing himself do these same things to suspects in Kentucky, and for some brief moments Olyphant taps into some wonderful reflective moments of regret and sickness when witnessing a very similar treatment to his own.
The middle section of the limited series feels almost like a patchwork of different influences, no doubt inspired by numerous complementing styles of police investigation. Raylan finds himself weaving through worlds between western and neo noir, both his character and the sturdiness of the show itself finding trouble setting sturdy footing. Holbrook is certainly having a great time filling the shoes of Raylan’s adversary but, it’s no controversy to say that Mansell is no Boyd Crowder, not by a long shot. But Mansell is still a compelling pathological study; he is as unpredictable in a strategic sense as he is in a violent one, and insights to his motivations or background don’t provide a full picture that can point to why exactly Mansell is the way he is. The standout performance from City Primeval lies with Sweetie, played by Vondie Curtis-Hall, whose ties to the players of the show run deeper than we realize, and his ties to Mansell prove to be dangerous, leading to the most gut-wrenching sequences in the series.
The writing quality in this limited series pales in comparison to the original show. This is partially because inserting Raylan into an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that follows a different protagonist feels stilted at times, although this becomes less of an issue as it does find its footing. The dialogue is quite a bit drier than what we were used to before, the colorful banter between characters reduced to mere moments every once in a while yet still enough to whet the whistle of seasons past. What’s being examined in City Primeval isn’t the happy-go-lucky nature of our favorite trigger-happy marshal whose secret vice is an ice cream cone, it’s the primal nature of what makes him tick. When he sees that mirrored in Mansell it scares Raylan — he doesn’t quite know how to think ahead of someone like himself. In some ways Mansell represents exactly what Raylan could have been.
Justified: City Primeval ends in a rather surprising way. It closes with the usual distillation of a choice Raylan is forced to make, but since he is consistently the main character of his own life, the choice is self-motivated. When the past reintroduces itself, we know that he’s come to a final decision. It’s an answer to a question never spoken, and Raylan’s response comes out of a growth of character we thought we’d never see from the man who houses so much anger underneath his cool and collected demeanor.
Raylan may have chosen the right thing for himself and those around him but he still chooses it for the wrong reasons. Perhaps that’s the pattern he perpetuates, not one of violence or anger, but selfish self-preservation that attaches itself to each threatening condition that comes with being in the Marshal service. Raylan is simply unaware of the nature of toxicity he himself perpetuates, and the sooner he turns his attention away from chasing criminals and towards the family that needs him, the sooner the flames that stoke the coals of his long-held prejudice against what he almost was, will cease.
Justified: City Primeval is currently available to stream in full on Hulu.
Justified: City Primeval offers a gripping conclusion, prompting Givens to confront his lingering prejudices and choose a path aligned with self-discovery. While he may make choices for the wrong reasons, the series suggests a hopeful future as Givens shifts his focus from chasing criminals to nurturing his family, leaving behind the toxicity he inadvertently perpetuated.
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GVN Rating 7.5
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Andre is an avid film watcher, blogger and podcaster. You can read their words on film at letterboxd and medium, and hear their voice on movies, monsters, and other weird things on Humanoids From the Deep Dive every other Monday. In their “off” time they volunteer as a film projectionist, reads fiction & nonfiction, comics, and plays video games until it’s way too late.