Ozark (2017-2022): Season 4 – Part One

Title: Ozark

Year: 2017-2022

Genre:  Crime | Drama| Thriller |

Seasons: 1 | 2| 3 | 4 |

Runtime: 60 min/episode

Created by: Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams

Starring: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner

8,4/10

STRONG PERFORMANCE SAVES A BLEAK SCRIPT

Ozark – season four, part one, continues its magnitude regarding stellar performance and close-knitted rhythmic pulsed storytelling that slowly expands the story further into what is the best part of the series. The new season continues the rampages, the verbal profanity and the interesting plot with its witty sense humour and stylized dialogue, characterization and performance that has become the highlights of the series, as it continues to ride on flow of tension building to a festive series-final. The story this season follows up on the relationship between the Byrde-family (especially) Marty and the Navarro’s drug cartel and enhancing their business. It digs deeper into the unconventional tongue to tongue-relationship that’s between Darlene and Wyatt.

 It takes a roller-coaster ride with Julia Garner’s performance of Ruth Langmore, who does a brilliant job in creating a thoughtful female character that both has charm, intelligence and is funny with a variety of quotes. She is a strong leader and is one of the solid winning parts of why this series still is on the air as she has grown in an efficient way in developing her strong leadership. Even if Jason Bateman steals his scenes and delivers his lines with charm and worth the effort, his estranged relationship with Ruth gives the series somewhat an annotation of what Jesse Pinkman was to Walt Whitman. If the series follows the same fictitious path in the relationship, it might get vile in the second part to come.

The music is still strong as forever with a variety of music, both instrumental and lyric that sets the mod even within the tensest and violent situation that might occur. The series has from the beginning announced that the violence is raw, there is blood, but doesn’t reach the level of hardcore horror in some scenes that were seen in Breaking Bad.

Yes, the series is still violent and filled with profanities, but the dangerous tension that other series have doesn’t really shape the series. It’s hard to take some threats seriously and some scenes take the intense magic away with corny humour and whatnot. It’s obvious in the end that the series strives for a worthwhile showdown but the tension build-up continues just only to rise to an anti-climactic semi-final. It’s annoying, I know, but it’s what it is, and hopefully, the other part of the ending series justifies the slow showdown of the first part.