Time waits for no one, and yet even as a middle-aged man (and father!) in a foreign city and a contemporary era, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) remains, in Justified: City Primeval, the same cocky, laid-back badass that fans knew and loved during the series’ original six seasons, which wrapped in 2015. A modern-day Kentucky-bred gunslinger in a ten-gallon hat and with a roguish twinkle (or steely intensity) in his eye, Raylan is an old schooler with new-school charm and wit, and FX’s eight-episode revival (premiering July 18) finds him a bit grayer and more exasperated by his responsibilities, but otherwise still a lawman of peerless cool and skill, as quick on the draw as he is with a smartass remark.
Fifteen years after he finished his long-running feud with hometown nemesis Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), Raylan is a part-time Florida dad to his and ex-wife Winona’s (Natalie Zea) daughter Willa (Vivian Olyphant, the star’s actual offspring). He also continues to work as a U.S. Marshal. That job gets in the way of his parenting when he and Willa are hit by a car on an Everglades highway by a fugitive, and Raylan is compelled to testify against him in a Detroit court. There, Raylan’s rule-breaking history and general willfulness are exploited by defense attorney Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis). They also rankle presiding Judge Alvin Guy (Keith David), who’s already in a foul mood due to a car-bomb attempt on his life earlier that morning. When the hearing concludes, Raylan is forced by his superiors to partner with local officer Wendell (Victor Williams) to figure out who’s behind the attempted assassination of Guy, much to his chagrin.
Raylan is thus stuck in a cold steel-blue urban environment that’s a far cry from his native warm-hued Kentucky stomping grounds, at least in terms of superficial atmosphere. For the most part, though, Raylan is right at home in Detroit, in large part because it’s populated by a familiar compendium of colorfully goofy good and evil characters.
Adapted from Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval and Fire in the Hole (the former of which doesn’t feature Raylan), Justified: City Primeval boasts, as its predecessors did, the author’s distinctive mix of silly and serious (and absurdly eloquent) personalities and knotted-up narratives. Spearheaded by longtime vets Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, who assume showrunner duties from Graham Yost, it has that trademark Leonard feel and sound, which is, in a certain sense, just about the best compliment one can pay it.
It also has Olyphant, who slips comfortably back into Raylan’s Stetson and collection of black and denim jackets. In a prior age, Olyphant would have been John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, and his performance is so formidable and severe, and yet simultaneously sly and playful, that it immediately validates this Wild Wild Midwest reboot. So too does a sprawling, spiraling-out-of-control story that gives Raylan plenty to do. No sooner does he join up with local roughneck police officers Maureen (Marin Ireland) and Norbert (Norbert Leo Butz) than Raylan lands in the middle of a bigger mess courtesy of Guy’s murder.
It doesn’t take the Marshall long to set his sights on Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), aka “The Oklahoma Wildman,” a thief and killer who recently blew back into town, shacking up with his cocktail waitress girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens) in order to swindle an Albanian gangster (Alexander Pobutsky) that she’s been seductively setting up as their next mark.
Assuming the de facto Goggins role as the yin to Olyphant’s yang, Holbrook does the finest work of his career in Justified: City Primeval, exuding malevolent swagger (sometimes in nothing but a kimono and tighty-whities) and a droll sense of humor as a wannabe-rock ‘n’ roll singer-via-The Joker who does whatever he pleases, including kill with nonchalant impunity. Clement and Raylan routinely engage in conversations whose easygoing surface masks their pistol-blasting seriousness, and the show does an excellent job devising confrontations and dilemmas that put the duo at each other’s throats, both of them eager to have an O.K. Corral-style face-off but stymied by circumstance, the law, and Raylan’s yeoman’s efforts to not indulge his more vigilante impulses.
Per Leonard tradition, Justified: City Primeval is awash in criminal (and criminal-adjacent) types, from cops, lawyers, and judges to casino managers, Albanian drug-runners and Sweetie (the great Vondie Curtis-Hall), a reluctant Clement associate who used to be a promising funk bassist and now tends bar at his own watering hole. These players are varying shades of scary and ridiculous, and Andron and Dinner weave them together in a saga that’s tangled up by fate, greed, desperation and stupidity, all of it revolving around the deceased Judge Guy’s little black book, which contains enough dirt to take down half of Detroit’s rich and powerful and, therefore, could be a powerful tool for achieving one’s ambitions, as more than one protagonist deduces.
An unlikely romance for Raylan additionally factors into Justified: City Primeval, whose action is electrified by smart twisty-turny plotting and charged, clever dialogue. As before, triumph is always laced with disappointment and sorrow (and vice versa), and that uniquely menacing-melancholy tone is embodied by Raylan, a hero torn between his warring desires to leave his cops-and-robbers (or cowboys-and-Indians) duties behind, and to see that justice (however difficult it is to define) is served. He’s a man of two hearts and minds, and that also goes for his belief in the system and his own instinct to set things straight with his pistol—a dynamic that’s constantly put to the test by scenarios, and individuals, that afford him few easy options.
“Sometimes the old ways are the only ways,” says an Albanian kingpin, and Justified: City Primeval finds a way to verify that statement without ignoring the many modern complications, contradictions and quagmires that Raylan faces during the course of his latest mission. In every respect, Andron and Dinner’s show is an ideal blend of the then and now, and that proves true all the way through to its finale, whose late surprises are so perfectly, satisfyingly thrilling that one can only hope they’re confirmation that this reboot is the start of a new, long-running Raylan Givens return engagement.
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