‘Justified: City Primeval’ Review: Raylan Is Back

Eight years after he walked — gingerly, warily, every joint bent at some odd angle — into the sunset on “Justified,” Timothy Olyphant returns on Tuesday in “Justified: City Primeval,” FX’s one-off, eight-episode sequel to its hit hillbilly noir. “Justified” was one of the most entertaining television shows of the last few decades largely because of Olyphant’s cagey, obliquely sexy portrayal of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a fantasy of a frontier lawman, simmering but sensitive, equally quick with a gun or a pithy comeback.

Olyphant does not miss a single syncopated beat in “City Primeval,” which is based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard, who created Givens and traced his career in a handful of books and stories. The character has left the page and become completely Olyphant’s. It’s a wonderfully economic performance, all slouch and sloe eyes, offering a moral thermometer of the fallen world through which Raylan moves via Olyphant’s sly repertoire of expressions: grin, smirk, smile, hard stare, blank bemusement.

Onscreen, Raylan has aged more than eight years — he now has a teenage daughter, Willa (played by Olyphant’s daughter Vivian Olyphant), who was a baby when “Justified” ended. Caustic, character-defining references are made to his advanced years: Chasing bad guys at his age means he’s been passed over or he loves it too much; a retired cop tells him, “You remind me of me, man, when I started out. Except you’re old.” These comments create some cognitive dissonance, because Olyphant, despite some gray hair, doesn’t come off as a day older. That could be seen as a lapse in his performance, but come on. We all know what we’re here for.

And it’s a good thing original Raylan is still there. Because despite the work of a number of the old “Justified” crew, including the writer-producers Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, and an accomplished new cast, “City Primeval” — though handsomely filmed, well acted and ample in its emotions and its violent action — feels, ultimately, like a simulacrum. The body looks good, but a large part of the soul is missing.

In considering why, it’s hard to avoid the fact that Raylan Givens does not appear in the novel on which the mini-series is based — he’s been shoehorned into another cop’s story. (The original protagonist, played by Paul Calderón, gets a short, awkward walk-on.) He’s also been taken out of the Kentucky landscape that was essential to “Justified” and sent on a road trip to Detroit, where he’s now an unwanted outsider rather than a prodigal son.

The change of scenery is fine in theory, but it doesn’t produce much. There are artful backdrops of urban decay, congruent with the rural poverty in “Justified,” and the largely Black cast of characters deals with injustices that parallel the hardships of the original show’s poor whites. But those elements feel obligatory — they come to life only here and there, usually in scenes involving Aunjanue Ellis as a lawyer whose life becomes entwined with Raylan’s.

And while the plotting of “Justified” was always complicated — a slow build of coincidences, missed connections, bad decisions and murderous eruptions that provided a broad canvas for human weakness and duplicity — in “City Primeval,” the complications feel forced, and there isn’t the same satisfaction when the pieces click into place.

The mechanisms by which Raylan and Willa end up in Detroit, and by which Raylan is pulled into the investigation of the killing of a judge, are murky and arbitrary. There’s no good reason for Raylan to be in this story beyond the demand for a sequel, and you can feel the writers straining with the effort of putting him there. Characters drift in and out, or disappear altogether (while still alive). A crew of Albanian gangsters, on hand for local color, conveniently drop out of the action just when you’re thinking, “They could wrap this all up in another 20 minutes.”

All along, though, there are reasons to watch. Some simply have to do with the preservation of moods and motifs from the original series, but some are new. One of those is the father-daughter relationship: Willa feels abandoned because of Raylan’s devotion to his job, and the Olyphants nicely render the crossroads of brazen but sorrowful teenage manipulation and agonizing parental guilt. (This section of the story is oddly truncated, though, another instance of haphazard storytelling.)

There are also excellent performers everywhere you look: Ellis; Vondie Curtis-Hall as a bar owner who used to be a musician; Norbert Leo Butz, Marin Ireland and Victor Williams as Detroit cops; Adelaide Clemens as the designated seductress. Boyd Holbrook of “Narcos” is smoothly menacing as the big bad: a talkative sociopath in the mold of Boyd Crowder from “Justified,” though you can’t help comparing him unfavorably with Walton Goggins, the man who played Boyd. David Cross turns in an amusing cameo as a wealthy mark. Terry Kinney is likable, as always, but not entirely convincing as an Albanian mob boss.

“City Primeval” gets off to an entertaining but confusing start — the first episode is better on a second viewing — and generates enough of the “Justified” brew of eccentricity, off-kilter humor and underplayed suspense to hold interest through a few episodes, before the plot runs out of gas and the malaise sets in. Then a funny thing happens: After the Detroit story is resolved, there’s an epilogue that takes place in a world where we, and presumably the show’s creators, would much rather be. At that point, revealed as the place holder it was all along, “City Primeval” drops right out of your memory.