TV Review: Money Heist is foolish, but it's a blast
Money Heist is back for its fifth and final series on Netflix.
The first thing you notice about Spain is the noise.
Their kids stay up until midnight and they all get up at 6am to ride around town on their little motor-bikes. They greet each other as if the other person was across the street, and they’re trying to make themselves heard over the sound of the little motor-bikes that have been going since 6am. Spain is the opposite of calm in a thrilling kind of way.
And so is made-in-Madrid Money Heist, back for its fifth and final series on Netflix. If you haven’t watched any of it, go back to the start, it’s a blast. If you’re wondering when the fifth series manages to hit the Money Heist heights — comedy, tension, love, hate, Salvador Dali masks and explosions — then it does, eventually.
The first two episodes of season two are mainly explosions, as if they are trying to appeal to some mythical man-child audience, who aren’t watching anyway because the show is in Spanish.
You can choose to watch Money Heist dubbed with American accents, if you want to completely ruin it. You need to hear them firing off blasts of Spanish at each other, a hard, frightening language when there is tension in the air, and then gentle and affectionate when there is loving to be done. (There is a fair bit of loving to be done. I wouldn’t blame the characters for this — they’re all really good-looking.)
If you never watched this show, each series features a gang of misfits who enter a central bank or museum, take hostages, rob the place and pull off an ingenious escape. The only one of the gang who doesn’t enter the bank is the leader, who stays outside and pulls the strings from a secret hide-out. He is called the Professor because he rarely raises his voice. The others in the gang shout nearly all the time.
They have also rolled out a series of brilliant cartoon villains in the show, who get thwarted just as they are about to catch their prey, like the coyote in Road Runner.
The key character is The Professor’s brother, known to us as Berlin. Sorry for the spoiler, but he doesn’t live very long in real-time. But we keep going back to him in flash-backs as he organises a series of big-brained heists that are all about money and arrogance. But we fall for him as we fell for Tony Soprano — a reminder that there is a little bit of gangster in all of us.
That little gangster will have to wait a bit for the finale, because they split Season 5 into two parts, with the final five episodes set to drop in early December. I can’t wait.
