There are two reasons to watch the new Irish-Dutch thriller Safe Harbour (Virgin Media One, Sunday 9pm): the Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson and the Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson’s moustache.
Having stepped away from acting after his Thrones character, horrid Prince Joffrey, was nuked at a nuptials, Gleeson returns to the screen to portray a Dublin mobster furnished with a hipster moustache that makes him look like the bassist from Fontaines DC modelling a new Bohemian FC jersey.
Gleeson is a graduate of the south Dublin school Gonzaga and Trinity College, so it is reasonable to conclude that he did not grow up on the mean streets of gangland Ireland. It is entirely possible that the closest he has come to the dark side of Dublin is being told that there is a 40-minute wait for brunch.
But rather than killing the mood, the fact that he looks like the least likely Irish mobster since Kevin Spacey depicted a thinly veiled version of Martin Cahill in Ordinary Decent Criminal helps to bring a useful air of desperation to his performance.
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His character, Farrell – since when do Irish people use surnames as first names? – is the son of the gangland boss Kieran, played by Colm Meaney, and you can see both Gleeson and his on-screen alter ego working overtime to convince Meaney that they are a worthy heir.
Farrell (yes, I know) is in Rotterdam with his sister, Sloane (what?) – played by Love/Hate actor Charlie Murphy – who is the brains of the operation. They need to hack into a Dutch security network to access a shipment at the port – which puts them in contact with two hackers, Marco and Tobias. The latter is portrayed by Alfie Allen, another Game of Thrones actor. And so Safe Harbour doubles as a reunion between two great villains of the George RR Martin universe. Raise your banners: Theon Greyjoy and Prince Joffrey are finally reunited on screen.
Freaky facial fuzz aside, the cast is top-notch, their performances almost enough to distract from a laboured plot (courtesy of showrunner Mark Williams, one of the creators of the Neflix meth thriller Ozark), which has far too much about computer hacking and is overly insistent about Rotterdam being a noirish neverland. (It looks like a city made entirely of leftover bits of Liberty Hall.)
There is also the unsatisfying quality of the Irish-Dutch staging. Safe Harbour isn’t Irish enough to feel genuinely homegrown. But the Dutch stuff feels tacked on. You are never entirely immersed in the Eurothriller elements. It also suffers from a plodding pace, and, in part one at least, there’s nowhere near enough of the reliably menacing Meaney.
There is also the question of whether we have not already reached peak Irish crime drama. Do we really need another cliched tale of drug dealers swearing up a storm? The answer, of course, is no – though Game of Thrones fans will at least be happy to check in with Gleeson to see what he’s been up to, even if the answer is essentially cultivating a lairy, hairy caterpillar on his upper lip.
