There has always been something faintly hilarious about Hells Angels. Perhaps it’s the unholy combination of dodgy leatherwear, comedy helmets and unrestrained beards, but they always look a little bit “midlife crisis spinning wildly out of control”, a little bit “minor members of the Def Leppard road crew”. It’s for this reason that Hells Angels are almost always deployed filmically for comic effect nowadays; indeed, up until recently the last major Hells Angels on-screen moment was 2007’s execrable midlife-crisis comedy Wild Hogs.
I say “until recently” because, of course, one year after Wild Hogs tried its hardest to ruin the biker gang’s mystique for generations to come, along came Sons of Anarchy to show us all the true face of the American Hells Angel, a serious, scowling, organised-criminal face, albeit still with a dodgy beard. These Hells Angels were not about to be pushed around by John Travolta and Tim Allen in “humorous” bandanas and unflattering trousers.
I have no idea if Sons of Anarchy is a realistic depiction of the biker subculture, but even if it is a grotesque exaggeration of everyday petty malfeasance, its early skirmishes were given a touch of class by faultless casting. It is pretty difficult, really, to balls up anything that has Ron Perlman in it. Damn near impossible.
Sons of Anarchy managed it, though.
For the first two-and-a-bit seasons, when it existed in its own self-contained Stateside world of dive bars, strip clubs and motorcycle clubhouses, Sons of Anarchy was just fine. But in the middle of the third series, it made the bold – by which I mean horrifyingly misguided – move of having the entire biker gang up sticks and head to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to hang out with the gang’s Celtic chapter. And if there’s one thing American TV should never try to do, it’s Ireland.
Cue sweeping aerial shots of the gang roaring along idyllic country lanes to sub-Enya bollocks. Cue some of the worst Oirish ah-be-jeebers accents committed to film; we’re talking Henry Thomas in Gangs of New York levels here. Depressingly, the worst offender is a fine character actor, Deadwood’s Titus Welliver, here playing a Real IRA hard man who couldn’t be more comedy-Irish if he were wearing a foam-rubber Guinness-branded St Paddy’s Day hat. But pretty much nobody escapes unblemished. There’s an early encounter with the Northern Irish police, for example, where one officer manages to be Irish, Scottish, scouse, Brooklyn Noo Yoik and Slovenian inside one sentence.
No Blarney stone is left unturned to remind us where we are. There are bagpipes, there are orphanages, barflies in flat caps, balaclava-clad gunmen, bare-knuckle boxers, a stern patrician priest – there are even gun-toting nuns, which is a lot less interesting than it sounds. All it needs for a full house is Roy Keane chasing Father Dougal across a mountain stream waving a shillelagh.
The sum total means that every second of Sons of Anarchy’s Ireland tour is toe-curling, and apparently scripted by someone whose sole exposure to that island’s culture has come via Michael Flatley. It makes everyone involved look ridiculous. And remember, we’re talking about middle-aged men who wear leather trousers here.
