‘The Westies’ Review: J.K. Simmons and Titus Welliver Lead MGM+’s Handsome but Generic Gangster Drama

On a textual level, MGM+’s The Westies is all about people who refuse to abide by the rules. Within the Irish and Italian criminal organizations of 1980s New York, low-level gangsters threaten rivals they’ve been explicitly instructed to leave alone. Mid-level ones deal drugs under the noses of bosses who’ve forbidden them. The best-laid plans are derailed by impulsive outbursts of anger or fear.

On a metatextual level, however, the entire season is an eight-hour exercise in coloring within the lines, without so much as a bit of snazzy shading to offer the illusion of depth. Despite a pair of decent lead turns from J.K. Simmons and Titus Welliver, the best that can be said of the latest gang drama from Chris Brancato and Michael Panes (Godfather of Harlem) is that it’s too competent to be unbearable, even if it’s also too unimaginative to be interesting.

The Alan Taylor-directed premiere begins at a moment of relative peace for the Irish American Westies (a real outfit that operated out of midcentury Manhattan, not that you need to know that to follow the series) and the Italian American Gambino crime family (also real, and more famous). After years of mutual violence, bosses Eamon Sweeney (Simmons) and Paul Castellano (Ron Lea) have called a truce, not out of any particular goodwill but out of a businessman’s understanding that both factions stand to make a ton of money off construction on the Javits Center in Hell’s Kitchen, if only they can stop getting in each other’s way.

Their followers, though, are less than thrilled with the détente, and less than conscientious about following its rules. The brutal efforts required to keep the men in line come at the cost of sowing discontent within the ranks — including in their increasingly disillusioned protégés, Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney) and John Gotti (Hamish Allan-Headly). Meanwhile, the feds have started circling, led by FBI agent Birdie Polk (Jessica Frances Dukes) with the reluctant help of dirty NYPD officer Glenn Keenan (Welliver).

With so much plot to get through, Brancato and Panes deserve credit for keeping the tone smooth and the pace even. The narrative beats move deliberately enough that a casual viewer won’t get lost in the weeds, but briskly enough that an attentive one will always have some new wrinkle to look forward to. The mood is resolutely straight-faced but not self-indulgent — this is not the kind of show that pretends to have big smart things to say about the false promise of the American Dream or the corrosive effects of revenge, but one that just thinks it’s neat when glowering tough guys point guns at each other.

All of it is set against a version of New York that appears admirably lived-in, from grimy streets to cramped apartments to bars that look run-down even before various thugs take guns and bats to them. As with the rest of the show, it’s nothing we haven’t seen in countless other gritty period dramas, but it speaks to the care and effort of production designer Rocco Mateo. If all you’re searching for is a generic crime drama to look pretty on your flatscreen while you cook dinner or answer emails, you could do worse than The Westies.

But you could probably do better, too. The Westies’ most glaring issue is its characters, or really the lack thereof: Nearly everyone onscreen comes off like a well-worn cliché rather than an individual with any distinctive personality or inner life.

Our hero, Jimmy, always does the right thing not because there’s any comprehensible reason he seems so much smarter and kinder than everyone else in his orbit, but because “good” and “smart” is just what heroes are. (“Hero” being a relative term in a milieu where everyone has at least a few murders under their belt.) He has a perfectly loving connection with his girlfriend, Bridget (a likable Sarah Bolger), not because there appears to be anything specific about their connection, but because that’s just what heroes deserve.

Bridget has her own subplot involving a secret history with the IRA, which is maybe the one element of The Westies that doesn’t feel straight out of a “how to write a gangster drama” checklist. But it’s so disconnected from the rest of the plot that I don’t know why I even brought it up in the first place, or more to the point, why the writers did.

Jimmy’s best friend is Mickey (Stanley Morgan), who’s practically a parody of the “hotheaded low-level gangster” stereotype. His contribution is being predictably unpredictable, by which I mean his ability to control himself waxes and wanes with the show’s need to throw a wrench into Jimmy’s careful plans or inject some tension into a high-stakes negotiation. Their other friends are interchangeably forgettable, and exist mainly to fill up screen space or get killed off.

Their most hated enemy is John Gotti, and if he feels familiar it’s less because Gotti, the actual historical figure, is so well-known and more because The Westies’ version of him is a sanded-down copy of every Italian mobster you’ve seen in every movie. You know that scene where a powerful gangster pretends to be extremely offended by something a less powerful guy has said, just to make him sweat a bit before bursting into raucous laughter? That’s how we’re introduced to him, because of course it is.

A few of the cast members do manage to suggest an interiority beyond what’s dictated in the scripts, and it won’t surprise you who they are. Sweeney might not be one of Simmons’ more interesting roles, but the actor brings enough snark or weariness to his line readings to make the character feel alive. And Welliver carries Keenan with a heaviness that hints at some profound private pain, though the precise cause of that sorrow becomes less interesting the more we learn about it.

Or perhaps it’s not that his backstory is insufficiently sad as much as the fact that, by the time we get the full scope of it, The Westies has given us so little reason to get invested in it — or anything else. There will be no complex emotions to process here, no grander themes to parse, not even any memorable quirks or zingy one-liners to remember. The best gangster dramas, from the works of Coppola to Scorsese to David Chase, offer vivid style, compelling characters and ambitious ideas in addition to the usual bag of body parts and revenge plots. The Westies settles for retracing the familiar tropes they’re built on.