Underbelly: Season One (BLU RAY)

While its TV run scored massive ratings, Underbelly’s appeal to the Australian television audience proved that the public will happily tune in for a half-arsed crime soap opera because there’s little else in the way of Oz-centric crime drama on offer. Underbelly’s glorification of the Melbourne gangland wars of the 1990’s coupled with an exploitative tits‘n’ass style is salacious and glossy enough to ensure that the casual viewer will find themselves guiltily hooked. It focuses primarily on the ‘Carlton Crew’ crime syndicate consisting of a variety of drug dealers and stand-over men such as Alphonse Gangitano (Vince Colosimo), Mick Gatto (Simon Westaway), loanshark Mario Condello (Martin Sacks), retired bank robber Graham Kinniburgh (Gerard Kennedy), drug-dealing siblings Jason and Mark Moran (Les Hill and Callan Mulvey) and Jason Moran's dim driver, Carl Williams (Gyton Grantley). Narrated in hindsight by police officers Steve Owen (Rodger Corser) and Jacqui James (Caroline Craig), members of Task Force Purana (which investigated the Melbourne gangland killings in the 2000’s), the plot is cobbled together from police records and often times, wholesale fiction. While the show runners had a golden opportunity to create something genuinely compelling and powerful, they ultimately go for the lowest common denominator, fiddling the facts only to churn out badly written and overacted, glossed-up crime-porn. Extras include extended uncut scenes, a behind the scenes featurette and a min-doco ‘Carl Williams: Day of Reckoning’.