What is it? A big, horny, hairy-chested waste of time.
Why you’ll love it: If you’ve longed to see a Portuguese language televisual interpretation of the popular computer game Grand Theft Auto, then Brazilian import Tainted has you written all over it. It also has “boobs”, “big weapon” and “bent copper” written all over it. Billed as a “sexy Brazilian crime drama”, the show focuses on ex-cop André Camara who has just served three years in prison for a crime his terminally ill dad (also a cop) actually committed. Papa croaked without leaving behind the promised confession that would clear his son’s name and now André is alone, shunned by a family who think he’s guilty and sitting at a dusty bus stop in the desert with no prospects. It becomes clear he must turn illegal bounty hunter to make ends meet.
There’s so little opportunity these days to unashamedly celebrate men punching and killing each other while pole dancers in plastic macs look on admiringly. This show casts aside decades of progress and takes popular culture back to a murky place where corrupt narks and topless sex workers hang out of every window, the men growling and pulling guns on each other, the women arching their eyebrows in perpetual sexual invitation.
Most conversations between the male characters are held at gunpoint, in a boxing ring or in the seedy manager’s office of a strip club. Stubble and sweat and sexy ladies’ belly buttons are almost always on screen, whatever else is going on. Our hero is beautiful and doomed and helpfully close-crops his luxurious hair to denote the edgy transformation of his character into a “bad boy”.
He’s in love with his brother’s alcoholic wife, drinks some unnamed clear spirit direct from the bottle and kicks out sex workers without paying them when he tires of their technique. When this desperate set of circumstances befalls him, my immediate reaction is: good. He deserves nothing more, the big one-dimensional idiot.
It seems I’m not the only one with a low opinion of him. About once an episode, two men on a black motorbike pull up and spray André with automatic gunfire, always just missing him. He, of course, stands his ground in the middle of the street and fires his handgun right back at them because he’s a MAN. It wouldn’t surprise me if the actors are making the “pee-ow pee-ow” noises under their breath, so childishly bad are the show’s frequent gun battles.
Each episode is a straight split between André’s overarching search for justice and the cases he takes on as a bounty hunter (he’s fed leads by his former partner at the police department, Lopes). The weekly guest plot nearly always involves an international visitor searching for a family member before we discover they’re not actually who they say they are. And a female sex worker with a secret. He meets a lot of those.
It’s not clear why the acquisitions folk at the usually great Walter Presents thought to fork out for this tosh. Perhaps as an antidote to all the nuanced, stimulating international drama they also show. Several times I pause to wonder if this is a period drama, but no, there’s a mobile phone or a laptop to confirm it’s set now. In summary: grunt bang oh crash foom!
Where: Walter Presents on All4
Length: Thirteen 40-minute episodes, available to stream now.
Standout episode: Episode two has the most ludicrously silly ending imaginable and if anything they could have made more of it.
If you liked Tainted, watch: Breaking Bad (Netflix), Sneaky Pete (Amazon Prime).
