Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Jeffrey Walker, Netflix.
Cast: Guy Pearce, Marta Dusseldorp, Aaron Pedersen, Roy Billing, Shane Jacobson.
Bad Debts, the first of the three feature-length movies, is based on the Jack Irish novels by Australian crime fiction writer Peter Temple. It’s engaging!
Jack Irish (Pearce), a former criminal lawyer at Greer-Irish, is getting his life back together again. Now, he spends his days as a part-time investigator looking for those who don’t want to be found. He’s also a debt collector, apprentice cabinet maker, punter and occasional lover.
Irish is set adrift after a former client murders his wife, Isabel. Disenchanted with the ‘dregs’ he was called to represent, he takes up alternate activities and sideline interests. By day, Irish visits his favourite ‘relics’ at his “other office” the Prince of Prussia. On many nights, he joins an elderly neighbour learning how to handcraft wood furniture. Irish and two pals buy a racehorse and Irish begins skip tracing and doing more hands-on forms of debt collection.
A former client Danny McKillop tries to contact him, but Irish doesn’t recall him. A telephone message is not followed up. Then Danny turns up dead and Jack has to take a walk back into a dark and dangerous past he thought he’d left forever.
What’s the point of digging up old troubles when life is hard enough: he’s still cooking for one, his beloved football team has moved interstate and the odds on his latest plunge at the track seem far too long.
Irish’s whiskey-infused survival is measured, and spent unravelling criminal schemes and hearing people deliver warnings that include “tread carefully”.
Irish meets journalist Linda Hillier (Dusseldorp, Janet King), who helps him solve this and a few other mysteries that present themselves. Other familiar local actors drifting in and out of the franchise include Pedersen, Billing and Jacobson.
Screenplay by Andrew Knight for this Australian film makes it appealing.
If you first watch the three TV movies (2012-14) in the order in which they were released, it will help with flow of the storylines: Black Tide and Dead Point. Then follow it up with the two-season television series (2016-18).
