INTELLIGENCE REVIEWS-SEASON ONE

• Review of Episode 0 (the pilot): Intelligence: The Movie

  I promised this one wayyyy back when I first actually saw the movie in its first run. Alas, real life got in the way. Anyway, I've had a chance to see it several times since then, including the reairing two weeks ago. So, I've got it pretty well fixed in my mind.

  Intelligence runs like a feature length film of about eighty minutes' length. This means it runs lean and mean. One rather annoying aspect (at least on first viewing) is the abrupt cliffhanger ending. This improves considerably upon further viewing, even though the reason for the annoyance remains. More on that later.

  Intelligence begins with a kick-ass sitar theme (which Canadian Air Farce is already shamelessly purloining) and some extended credits as we roll past the Lion's Gate bridge on the opposite side from Da Vinci's Inquest's old end blue-screen end theme, then watch a dippy, young junkie/thief named Bootsie (Brendan Fletcher) go about his nightly carjacking ways. We segue to a man (Ian Tracey) in a snazzy Armani-style suit driving through the dark streets of Vancouver at night in a nice rental car. He's clearly tired and from his near-constant phone conversations we learn that he's just got back from Hong Kong where he bought a new boat for a small fleet that he owns. One phone call is answered by a preteen girl who turns out to be his daughter, Stella (Sophie Hough). She's "home alone", since her drug-addicted mother, Francine (Camille Sullivan) is out with the boyfriend (Chris William Martin) her estranged husband isn't supposed to know about (but does).

  Stella's worried father calls for someone to watch the house. During his conversations, he continually glances at a car behind him, eventually scraping it off by roaring off to a side street and parking. His eventual destination is a seedy strip-bar, the Chickadee Club (in real life, the Penthouse Club on Seymour Street). Once there, he's greeted by Ronnie Delmonico (John Cassini), who calls him "Jimmy" and appears to be his employee, even though Ronnie owns the strip club.

  When Ronnie starts telling Jimmy about some "guys" who want to talk to him about "medicinal weed" and a marijuana grow-op that has been raided, Jimmy asks Ronnie "when's the last time this place got swept"? He's worried about surveillance, though this doesn't stop him from interviewing the two bozos in charge of the grow-op that was knocked over—Bill (Dan Joffre) and Harvey (Zak Santiago). Lots more on these two later on. They claim to know nothing about the robbery—even though Jimmy and Ronnie are both convinced that it was an inside job. Jimmy suggests the bozos take a polygraph test, to which they reluctantly agree. Once they leave, though, Ronnie wants to take them both out. "You can't afford to go soft." Jimmy vehemently disagrees. He wants to be sure of their guilt before he does anything: "Worse than soft is stupid."

  Obviously, "Jimmy" is no ordinary businessman back from Hong Kong. And his paranoia is thoroughly justified. As we find out from the get-go during his conversation with his daughter, he is indeed under surveillance—at his house, his business, the club, his daughter's house…all over. This is because he is Jimmy Reardon, a major Vancouver pot smuggler, third generation. Granddad ran rum during Prohibition (which reminds me of my Irish great-grandfather trying to make bathtub gin for sale in the basement during the Depression and blowing out the windows, whereupon my Métis great-grandmother absolutely forbade him from doing it ever again. But that's another story). Dad ran heroin. Jimmy runs pot. He is under surveillance by the local (and currently fictional) Vancouver Organized Crime Unit, headed by Mary Spalding (Klea Scott). The surveillance is being supervised by Ted Altman (Matt Frewer), Mary's scuzzball second in command, who has made Jimmy his obsessional target for the past few years.

  Cut to Mary. We first see her in bed, working on a brief for CSIS (the Canadian version of the U.S.'s CIA) while her husband, Adam (Michael Rawlins), takes a shower. CSIS wants Mary to work up a group of local informants that could be used to spy for national security interests. Mary is exasperated with CSIS because of their heavy-handed demands, as well as the lack of high-level informants combined with an overabundance of mickeymouse snitches. Ah ha, you're thinking. Maybe Mary needs to recruit Jimmy Reardon. Have patience, grasshopper.

  Mary's worries are cut short by a new one—while her husband is in the shower, his cellphone rings. Unable to get his attention, Mary answers it and gets a mysteriously dead line. Suspicious, she notes down the number, then checks her husband's luggage. She finds condoms. Seems his impending "business" trip has a bit of extracurricular pleasure factored in. We see her shoulders sag as she realizes that her marriage has just been torpedoed. By the time her husband gets out of the shower, she's back in bed, pretending nothing has happened. Fortunately, he's not expecting any nookie because he sure wouldn't be getting any that night.

  After the commercial break, we see Jimmy's morning, which starts with a rather strange visit from the Coast Guard (and an ambiguous cup of coffee with a blonde who does not appear again). They want to borrow his boat for a rescue. There's a nice bit, if you're a straight woman or gay man, where Jimmy comes downstairs pulling on his shirt that is worth setting your VCR so you can do slow-mo playback. Yea verily, the pause button. Since neither Haddock nor Tracey is much for either cheese or beefcake, the purpose of this bit seems to be twofold. First, it establishes that Tracey can pull off a U.S.-style leading-man vibe (since leading men in the U.S. usually find themselves having to strip off at least their shirts). Second, it shows that Jimmy is a little bit vain, since he's had a wax. The omnipresent gold chain and the nice clothes that he wears emphasizes this, as well.

  We cut back and forth between Jimmy and Mary. Mary is breaking the news about CSIS' poaching-to-be to her troops (who are less than happy, especially with Ted priming the men for rebellion and trying to shut out the women). Meanwhile, Jimmy is picking up Stella to take her to school. Fans of Tom Stone (AKA Stone Undercover in the U.S.) will greatly appreciate a brief scene of Chris Martin in his tidy-whities.

  Francine tries to get Jimmy to front her some coke so that she can deal for him, practically simpering at him. "Whatever happened to rehab?" Jimmy asks in disgust. He absolutely refuses and tells her not to ask again. Francine does not respond well and we quickly see (assuming we needed any real proof) that Francine is none too stable—or clean. A later attempt to get him to front her doesn't go well, either. When it fails, she says, "Please, can't we try to be civil to each other?" as if she'd just asked him for child support instead of blow. "I tried that for about ten years," he replies, looking as if he's bitten into something sour. Oh, yeah. That divorce sure went a full twenty rounds.

  I found Suki (Sullivan's character in DVI) quite annoying in later seasons. After some early promise as Brian's in-over-her-head narc squad partner, she quickly devolved into Kosmo and Mick's expositional grass and then sank into the bottomless swamp known as Being Mick's Girlfriend. Mick was a great character, but only Kosmo ever held up under that pressure, let alone thrived. It's nice, therefore, to see Sullivan playing a woman with a lot of edge to her. Francine may be high-maintenance and unidimensional, but Sullivan really savors every twitch, stumble and angry quaver. Her fans should definitely tune in.

  This scene also has an immediate significance and one more subtle and long-term. The first is that Jimmy despises hard drugs (we later find out that the one thing he loathes more than coke is heroin). The second is that we later find out Francine's boyfriend is trying to set Jimmy up for drug trafficking by getting him to front her the coke. And then he tries to kidnap Stella! Turns out the guy is working for Ted. Boy, you just can't trust anybody these days—especially your sleazoid, coke-snorting, lowlife new boyfriend.

  Back to Mary, who's getting flowers from her duplicitous (but so far oblivious hubby), then back to Jimmy, who leaves his daughter off at school. Jimmy is still distracted by strange-looking cars that seem to be tailing him. Stella is a sensible kid and she and her dad have a sweet, easygoing relationship that's fun to watch. I like the actress, who manages to be sweet without being icky (working with Tracey helped, no doubt. He's fantastic with kid actors, having once been one). We then go back to Mary and Ted, who are each meeting with their respective allies. Mary's are more interesting—particularly Don Frazer (the lovely Edinburoughish Andrew Airlie—who played Matt Frewer's ethical defense lawyer in DVI's eps Fantasy and Reality), head of the Vancouver PD Narc Squad, her ambitious and loyal underling Angela Mesa (Rebecca Robbins, last seen chauffeuring Dominic Da Vinci around town) and her pleasant, but rather naïve, secretary Sheila (Kyla Wise). She also has a mutually charming meeting with a potential informant, elegant and straight-up Russian madame Katarina (Ona Grauer, who really should have got more than one and a half scenes).

  Don Frazer also needs to be in a lot more of the series, even though he's in a ton of the pilot. Don is extremely soft-spoken and friendly, but he has no trouble chewing Ted a new body orifice at one point in the second hour, a transition that Airlie also makes effortlessly. And then there's Mary's little "thing" for him (more on that later). We also see Don meet with two of his undercover people in an awfully familiar restaurant (that one that's been shut down on Main over by the Fraser bus stop, maybe?). One of them, scuzzy Rene Desjardins (Michael Eklund), happens to be in Jimmy's pocket. We also see Ted conniving behind Mary's back (yawn) and Jimmy meeting with his security expert, Alex Federov, played by Patrick Gallagher (Detective Joe Finn in Da Vinci's Inquest and City Hall). Gallagher one of the best lines in the movie when his character calls up a polygraph expert for Jimmy: "Get outta bed, you lazy bum. I got a job for you."

  Jimmy also meets with his dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks brother Michael (Bernie Coulson, looking a bit portly), who is in jail, and his level-headed sister, Maxine (Sabrina Grdevich), at his legitimate business front, Reardon Shipping (when Rene looks up Jimmy's file, there's a mention of another brother, but we don't see or hear about him otherwise). There is more than a hint that Jimmy actually wants to make Reardon Shipping more than a front and go legit. He may have been born into the criminal life, but he's really an entrepreneur.

  Grdevich, like Grauer, is not in nearly enough of the pilot. She has a great scene with Coulson, where she tells Michael straight out, "Why are you so stupid?!" Her delivery is hilarious. Clearly, her too-vague role in the indie flick "Lola" was just a fluke of bad writing. She needs to get more airtime. Dysfunction is all very nice, but it's far more fun to watch Jimmy, Maxine and Stella struggle to maintain healthy lives in the face of the fuck-up fairies that comprise the rest of their family.

  We next get a really cool scene, possibly the best in the pilot—Michael asks Jimmy to go over to his daughter's (Jimmy's niece's) house and see how she's doing. Ah, dear, sweet Lila. Turns out Lila's shooting coke and doing threesomes with a couple of biker dudes. Jimmy strolls in downstairs, punching one guy right in the face and stepping back to watch him drop. After throwing him out ("Can I at least get my shirt?" the guy says before Jimmy slams the door in his face), Jimmy goes upstairs, where he finds Lila and the other biker getting dressed. He beats the crap out of the second guy, before bundling his Lila back to Francine's house. Yup. The family that detoxs together stays together.

  Meanwhile, Mary is getting a call from a PI in Toronto (played by Stephen Miller—yayyy) telling her that her husband has just arrived at his hotel with a young woman. Mary asks, almost (but not really) as an afterthought, "Was she white?" The answer is yes. Ahh. There's a big old chunk in Mary's armor we're sure to see later on in the series. Meanwhile, Mary is having everybody recruit their own informants to work for CSIS as well. One of the informants, Casey Whelan (Melanie Papalia), is especially enthusiastic about joining up. She's working as a secretary for a lawyer, Randy, who is in with the bikers and she is burbling away to Angela Mesa about how she's getting married. What she fails to mention until much later on is that she's getting married to Randy. The lights are on, but nobody's paying the electric bill there.

  Chez Reardon, Jimmy is wrapping up the evening by running his daughter through "The Talk" about always being aware of her surroundings. She knows it by heart. We will later see her put it to surprisingly effective practice. Her father then discovers that the check for his new boat has bounced and worries increasingly about security.

  And that's just the first hour.

  So far, things look deadlocked between Jimmy's crew and Mary's. But we didn't quite reckon with Ted—or should I say, Ted's incredible stupidity. Ted takes the new informant files home with him from the office. But while he's stopped at a convenience store, Bootsie the Car Thief (remember him?) jacks his car and steals his briefcase just chock full of informants' files.

  Now, I'll grant that I've been hard on Ted as a character throughout this review. He just doesn't work very well. There really isn't enough background to make him believable and he's so invincibly stupid that it's hard to get any feel for how he would react if cornered. But once Ted gets dropped through the hangman's trapdoor, Frewer finally gets a handle on the guy and does a nice job of showing Ted freaking out. Ted unfortunately gets boring again once he regains his footing (or thinks he does). But for about ten minutes there, he's actually lots of fun.

  Mary has to field two crises at once—right after Ted's panicked call, her husband calls. This is a sweet and nasty little scene. "How are you, dear?" Adam asks, oblivious to being caught out, let alone the situation with Ted. "How am I?" Mary shoots back as she yanks on clothing, clearly thinking furiously through Ted's latest screw-up. "Fuck you; I'm getting a divorce. That's how I am. You're fucking a white girl. Don't bother to come home; you don't have one." On her way out, she arranges to have the locks changed.

  As we watch the OCU team scramble to get it together and get their informants back in from the field, Bootsie wends his way down the street to…you guessed it: Ronnie's strip club. Once inside, he homes in on a sharp knife in Ronnie's employee drawer who talks him out of both Ted's horseman (RCMP) shield and the files in exchange for a measly thousand bucks. Meanwhile, Mary has an interview for the West Coast CSIS director position, keeping her own crisis situation very much under the radar of her would-be new bosses.

  Files in hand, Ronnie, of course, immediately contacts Jimmy, who is still trying to get a handle on who is his organization's informant and who is watching him—his primary concern up to then. Ronnie has the strip club swept and finds a bug. But once they get hold of the files, the game and their goals quickly change. Ronnie wants to cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war—namely, give away the files to the other crime organizations in exchange for favors. Jimmy doesn't like that idea. He decides instead to contact the OCU via his cop grass Rene and make a deal in exchange for future immunity. Don Frazer balks at first—but not once he finds out who has the files. He ruefully knows that Jimmy is the dream informant Mary has been searching for.

  He's right, of course. Mary perks right up and jumps into a series of negotiations with Jimmy, not just over the files but over his potential as a supergrass for the feds. Even the murder of an informant (whom Jimmy swears he did not betray) doesn't dampen the lively gamesmanship. Jimmy pretends to be cold and uninterested, but he's clearly intrigued by Mary's offer. Mary doesn't seduce; she woos. Her would-be paramour, Don, is uneasy with this approach. But Jimmy is actually flattered. Mary has inadvertently hit on something that he dearly wants, even more than to find out who his rat is. Jimmy's big dream is to go straight. Mary can help him achieve that dream.

  But not all is golden chez Reardon. Jimmy soon discovers a major screw-up that his brother has cooked up in jail with some informant in the OCU from the Hong Kong police. Seems Michael made a deal to ship over some heroin on Jimmy's new boat. Whoops. Jimmy has to figure out how to intercept the boat in international waters and offload it. As Mary later finds out, the DEA is aware of the shipment and wants to use it to bust Jimmy (they neither know nor care that it was actually Michael who set up the deal).

  There is great rejoicing at the OCU when Mary eventually gets back the files, though Jimmy keeps copies, just in case, and Mary is still determined to clean house—specifically of Ted. Meanwhile, once he has settled things with Mary, Jimmy goes back to the task of ferreting out his rat. Just because Mary intrigues him doesn't mean he trusts her (any more than she trusts him). He decides that Bill and Harvey ("Judas and his bum boy," as Ronnie snarkily puts it) are the key. Once Michael gets out (a really unclear bit of the timeline, since my impression was that Michael still had a couple of years left on his sentence), he and Jimmy take Bill and Harvey for a swim in the harbor. Now, the waters off Vancouver are Arctic cold, so taking a swim in them is a nasty business. In short order, Jimmy and Michael get the truth out of the boys—Bill confesses that he was set up by the cops. They caught him with an underage girl (ick) and forced him to agree to help turn over his own grow-op and set up Jimmy. Bill is rather blissfully unaware that Ted was actually trying to provoke Jimmy into whacking one of his own people and get him on a conspiracy to murder charge.

  Armed with this knowledge, Jimmy turns on Mary, gleefully telling her that he will release his copies of the files to the newspapers. Mary's house of cards is already falling; her husband is in the hospital with a stroke. Everything she worked so hard for is crumbling. But just when it can't seem to get any worse, Ted engineers a kidnap attempt on Stella via Francine's scuzzy boyfriend that goes badly wrong. This dissolves in an annoying cliffhanger ending as Jimmy agrees to back down. Ted appears to win over both Jimmy and Mary as he sends a SWAT team after the kidnappers to cover his trail.

  There is a point to the ending, though. Jimmy readily gives up his control over Mary even though he knows his daughter is safe and that it was actually her friend who was kidnapped. Jimmy will not stand by and let an innocent suffer for his own gain. This refusal to go for the lowest common denominator is critical in the long run if the viewer is to sympathize with Jimmy and want to root for him. Up until then, he's been a bit ambiguous. The ending sets his moral limits. The very last scene, therefore, with Jimmy hugging his frightened daughter inside his pickup while a thunderstorm obscures the view of them through the windshield, is critical to establishing his character.

  Next week: Series premiere Where Good Men Die Like Dogs: Jimmy and Mary have morning-after regrets about their deal and Jimmy's rat goes to that big treadmill in the sky.

  ---

You are visitor number

View Page Stats See who's visiting this page.

This page was last updated on 10/10/2006