A bad wig and OTT characters make this crime series darkly comic

Safe Harbor ★★★

A city’s docks have long been a potent setting for fictionalised screen drama. There’s the physical hustle of commerce unfolding, the anthropological detail of working-class tradition, and the seemingly eternal intrigue of organised crime around the edges. From a wounded Marlon Brando staggering through longshoremen at the conclusion of the 1954 Hollywood classic On the Waterfront to the tragic machinations at Baltimore’s docks in the second season of The Wire, berthed ships have long unloaded gripping stories.

The latest title to cover the waterfront is this European co-production, which follows a pair of struggling computer coders who fall into the hands of a crime syndicate looking to expedite their illegal drug shipments through the Dutch port of Rotterdam. While an opening title card notes that the show was “inspired by true events”, it’s simpler to view Safe Harbor as a fictionalised work. That lets you make sense of the crucial tonal shifts that underpin it.

While the narrative has a familiar momentum, there are kinks – structural and sexual – that keep changing how you perceive the show. Created by Mark Williams, whose notable previous credit was as co-creator of the Netflix crime drama Ozark, Safe Harbor is grounded in plausible needs, but the execution allows for sly humour, cartoonish violence and ludicrous dilemmas. At a certain point, you have to accept the show wants to undercut the tension with blackly comic farce.

Certainly, the predicament of aspiring Dutch tech CEO Marco de Bont (Martijn Lakemeier) and his British university pal and coding whiz Tobias Chapman (Alfie Allen) is straightforward: they’re broke. Marco can’t finish his grand corporate plan and Tobias worries he will lose his girlfriend, Rika Rogers (Gaite Jansen). As former student hackers trying to stay afloat in the corporate realm, it’s a necessary last resort for Marco to look for temp work on the dark web.

The offer he responds to is a stress-test for the digital security system of Rotterdam’s port, the busiest in all of Europe. But the clients aren’t the authorities, they’re the second generation of an Irish crime clan that’s losing too many shipments.

Sloane Walsh (Charlie Murphy) wants the duo to hack the system so the contraband containers can exit the port untouched. Her brother, Farrell (Jack Gleeson), wants to do things the old-fashioned way, which apparently involves threatening people and killing them if required.

Farrell is at times a ludicrous character, gung-ho and over the top (a shaggy wig doesn’t help). What the show wants is to put that up against Marco’s common sense and ambition – the keyboard meets the gun. As first the police, then a local crime syndicate who consider the docks their lucrative possession, get involved, risk ratchets up on the unprepared Marco. At every turn, he’s besieged, including by a venture capitalist ex-girlfriend who keeps propositioning him and her roid rage boyfriend, who keeps threatening him.