Bad Blood 2: A Different Kind of Mob Story

Bad Blood is back with its second streaming season on Netflix.   My wife and I binged and liked it better than the first, which we liked a lot.

The reason: Kim Coates' Declan gets a lot more time, as the mob boss who has trust only in himself.  This was actually the essence of the first season, but we didn't learn that until the very end, when Declan has wiped out everyone around him, including the boss and the boss's patriarch father, in Declan's climb to power.

In the second season, Declan has all the power, but he amasses enemies when he refuses to work for the Italians who have an international drug trade, expanding now to include the powerful and deadly fentanyl.   Declan now needs allies, but his possibilities, ranging from bikers and another local mafia mob, are also being wooed, threatened, paid off, and seduced by the international group, who have sent a pair of ruthless twins, female and male, to Montreal to make sure they get their way.

As with first season, no one is safe when the tensions heat up into war, and bullets start flying.  As with the first season, you'll be surprised about who is left standing and who isn't.   Indeed, what makes Bad Blood different from any other television mob series are the number of major players who get wiped out each season.  So many met this fate in the first season, that, other than Declan, we're treated to an almost entirely different cast of characters.  And they're so well played, we barely miss the characters from season one.

Coates does a great job, again, as Declan.  He has an expressive face, and a voice that does it just the right with intonations and inflections in every scene he's in, as a player and a voice-over narrator.  It's not easy to be original in a mob story, it's such well trodden ground, but Bad Blood 2 amply does that and his highly recommended.

See also Bad Blood: New Mob

 

Bad Blood: New Mob

It's hard to do anything new with a gangster story, let alone one about the mob.  But Bad Blood, the first season on Netflix (the one my wife and I binged), the second season already on Canadian TV - manages to do just that, with a stellar cast and a surprising story.

First the cast - you can't go wrong with Anthony LaPaglia and Paul Sorvino in a mafia narrative.  We knew Kim Coates from Sons of Anarchy.  He turned out to be the unpredictable, darkly charismatic, leading character in Bad Blood - someone who can turn from comforting to menacing on a dime.

The story takes in Montreal, a six or so hour drive from where we are near New York City, which plays a role in this story, too.  Vito (LaPaglia) runs an outfit under siege north of the border.  Sorvino plays his not fully retired father and Coates, not blood, but Declan who is second in command.  (Maxim Roy is memorable as Michelle, Vito's longstanding girlfriend.  Enrico Colantoni is welcome to see as Bruno the consigliere) The siege they're under comes from the bikers, Irish, and assorted gangs under Vito's umbrella in Montreal, plus a rival mob in New York, plus the US Feds who are out to get Vito on a murder he didn't commit in New York decades ago.

I won't tell you anymore about what happens - I pledged my silence to the mob - except to say that important members of Vito's crew and family start getting killed.  Who is behind this is somewhat surprising but completely logical in retrospect.   Who actually does get assassinated will totally surprise you.

We've always loved Montreal.  Tina's family hails from there (I'm pretty sure they had nothing to do with the mob), and you can't beat the deli (they call it "smoked meat") and bagels (the latter, especially, different from what we have in New York).   We'll definitely watch the second season when Netflix picks it up (which it better do).