'Justified,'
shoot-em-up, with laughs
Mix of violence and humor is pure Elmore Leonard
By Tom Conroy
Mar 15, 2010
In the motion-picture business, there is reportedly something called notes, which are bits of advice given by the noncreative types with money to the creative types actually working on the project.
After the suits at FX bought the pilot to “Justified,” they must have given the creators quite a set of notes.
The pilot, airing tomorrow, is a violent tale that sets up a neo-western confrontation between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant of “Deadwood”) and his old friend Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins of “The Shield”), a sociopath who runs a white-supremacist crime gang in the town where they both grew up. The considerable suspense is broken occasionally by light humor.
In the other two episodes FX made available for review, the humor is front and center. Boyd is basically out of the picture, and the criminals, while capable of deadly force, are generally incompetent.
Fortunately, although the darker-toned pilot is probably the best of the three episodes, both versions of the show are pretty good.
Raylan, who is sent to his home state of Kentucky after a shooting that he says was “justified,” is laconic and gentlemanly, even though he almost never takes his cowboy hat off indoors. He has a tendency to get into situations where he’s squaring off with a gun-toting bad guy whom he tells to either surrender or get killed. (Having Raylan say, “Draw!” would probably be too on-the-nose.)
Olyphant brings considerable gravitas to the role; he actually seems like the type of person who could stare down a gunman while giving him a chance to shoot.
While this persona is perfect as Raylan is confronting the despicable Boyd in the pilot, it sometimes gets played for laughs in the other two episodes, in which Raylan comes across as a conventional fish out of water — in this case, a lawman with old values trying to do his job in a morally ambivalent modern world.
Elmore Leonard, one of the show’s executive producers and the author of the books in which the character of Raylan first appeared, is a master at mixing violent drama an incongruous humor.
Some recurring characters and plotlines are a little too familiar: Raylan has an exasperated but understanding ex-wife (Natalie Zea) and a young-widow love interest (Joelle Carter), whom he can’t touch because she’s a witness to one of his possibly unjustified shootings.
One scene in which two hired guns are discussing a movie while sitting in a car seems straight out of “Pulp Fiction,” but the screenwriters acknowledge the lift, because the movie in question is, in fact, “Pulp Fiction.”
Later, a tense scene is interrupted by a discussion of whether Hermie, the elf dentist from the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” Christmas special, is gay.
The episodes are filled with quirky characters who act in unexpected ways. While this is generally a good thing, sometimes the guest stars are so prominently featured that Raylan seems like a guest in his own show.
Audiences tend to like to know whether they’re going to be served a drama with comedy or a comedy with drama. The good news for “Justified” is that either mix seems to work for the show, but the producers will probably have to pick a recipe and stick with it.
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