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Tyrant Review – “Hail Mary”

Tyrant Review - "Hail Mary"
Review by Brandon Wolfe
‘Tyrant’ picks up the thread from last week with the public protest against President Jamal still raging on, the flames being fanned by the rebellious Ihab Rashid. Bassam has taken it upon himself to resolve this crisis peacefully, to redeem his family name after the years of violent tyranny perpetrated by his father. He has set a meeting with Rashid to try to talk things out, but Bassam shows some savviness when he cancels the meeting at the last minute, realizing that Rashid would just use it as an opportunity to grandstand in front of his followers rather than engage in a dialogue. Bassam finds a new tack to pursue, or rather a new Rashid. Twenty years prior, Bassam’s father and Ihab’s father, Sheik Rashid, came extremely close to a peaceful resolution before things ended up going south and Sheik went into exile. Who better, Bassam figures, to bring about peace now than the only man who ever came close to pulling it off in the past?

Bassam’s quest for peace is the driving force behind “Hail Mary”, but it doesn’t make for a gripping hour of television. For starters, Adam Rayner as Bassam is still asleep at the wheel, delivering his lines with a blasé earnestness, but with no passion or heat. Rayner’s performance never feels alive, never grabs us and demands our attention. Even when Bassam, working with smug American ambassador John Tucker, orchestrates a meeting with Sheik Rashid where he must willfully submit to abduction via a bag placed over his head, finding himself in the hostile company of Rashid followers who detest him for being an Al-Fayeed, we never feel the tension that we should because Rayner doesn’t convey anything beyond the ability to recite his lines. If ‘Tyrant’ is going to be a story about how Bassam is corrupted by power, as its unambiguous ‘Godfather’ parallels would seem to suggest, lighting a fire under Rayner is going to be necessary as the series progresses.

One character who has all the fire in the world is Jamal. Ashraf Barhom remains the only member of the cast proving capable of making any of these flat characters come to life. Jamal carries within him such explosive energy, and when he keeps it contained, as he does as he submits to allowing Bassam to pursue a nonviolent solution to the civil unrest, he’s like a caged animal, his aggressive instincts just barely being kept at bay. And when Jamal does let the animal out, it’s truly frightening. When Nusrat’s father approaches Jamal to request that she be allowed to divorce Jamal’s son, Ahmed, due to her unrelenting trauma from Jamal’s pre-wedding assault of her, Jamal becomes unhinged, intimidating the man before ultimately shooting him in the arm. I couldn’t call Jamal a better constructed character than anyone else on this show, but Barhom’s live-wire performance is one of the only things keeping the series at all interesting.

Mercifully, we get a reprieve this week from Bassam’s banal children, but not from his banal wife, as Molly discovers housekeeper Reema stealing Vicodin for her brother, whom she claims has a broken arm and can’t go to a hospital because his injuries occurred at the demonstration and he would be considered a criminal. Molly, sharing her husband’s gut-level compassion, uses her clout as an Al-Fayeed to get the man medical treatment with no questions asked. This is not an interesting development and Jennifer Finnigan as Molly matches Rayner perfectly with her doe-eyed blankness. ‘Tyrant’s’ casting director should have employed far less pod people.

How it all shakes out is that Bassam pleads his case to Sheik Rashid and fails to get the man’s support toward the cause, coming home dejected and forced to face a furious Jamal. But then, wouldn’t you know it, just as General Tariq’s troops are about to storm the plaza to clear out the protestors, Sheik appears, embraces his son, publicly states his desire for a sit-down with Jamal and the troops are ordered to stand down. Whew. Good to see everything work out in the most dramatically convenient and transparently manufactured way possible. Such is the way of ‘Tyrant’.

We are now at the halfway point of ‘Tyrant’s’ ten-episode first season and there’s no evidence in sight that the show will pull itself out of the doldrums it resides in. It’s simply not a well-written show, especially from a dialogue standpoint (at one point, Leila, Jamal’s Lady Macbeth of a wife, asks a grim-faced General Tariq “Who drowned your puppy?”, an expression I’m sure is quite commonplace in most Middle Eastern nations). The series’ ineffectualness is proving to be a blight on FX’s otherwise sterling level of quality. Hopefully when the threat of cancellation is imminent, there won’t be a savior magically stepping forward at the perfect moment to save ‘Tyrant’s’ bacon.

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