Just five years ago, Tom Hardy was the nation's whisperer-in-chief, bewildering viewers as the formidable top-hatted adventurer Jack Delaney in the BBC drama Taboo. Some viewers were angry, while others reckoned that the 98 pig-like grunts Hardy emitted in the first seven episodes were not so much signs of an apparently pre-verbal role, but rather a cry for help.
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How nice to report then that in Sky Nature's new Predators series, Hardy has stepped back from the brink of incomprehensibility. In future episodes, polar bears, wild dogs, cougars and lions will take center stage, but here we watch two male cheetahs mow down as much of the Tanzanian wildlife as they can, while Hardy narrates with the crisp enunciation of a post-war Eliza. makeover. Doolittle. Perhaps reading bedtime stories calms a person.
The only pig-like grunts you'll hear in Predators come from the prey who realizes too late that, like the innocent insects eaten by Matt Hancock, their fate is for their final moments to provide bloody entertainment for forms of supposedly superior lives.
But there is a problem. Presumably Sky hired Hardy because he, like Ross Kemp or Vinnie Jones of late, has a masculinist resume to lend credibility to the script. Here, however, he brings something more fairy-like to his task. He's not as comically stentorian as Matt Berry, nor as whispery as David Attenborough, but rather he smells like some old-school English actor as he sets up the scene. “In the Serengeti of Tanzania, a famous brotherhood of cheetahs,” he intones. Or: “A flotilla of crocodiles, the main predators of this aquatic world.”
Kudos to Hardy: I never had to turn on the subtitles, which is more than can be said for most mumblecore TV production.
My favorite speech comes when our two protagonists expect to have to fight off an intruding man, before discovering a surprising truth. “The rival male is a female and, despite her icy welcome, she wants to mate. “Females only mate with strong, fit males.” Not only is nature red in tooth and claw, but it is apparently relentlessly heteronormative. Does it really have to be like this? We know that there are homosexual penguins; When will gay cheetahs have representation?
Director Will Benson has assembled footage of drones, jeep-mounted crews and other devices to trace a narrative arc that's strikingly reminiscent of the recent Gangs of London series. Two young male cheetahs (think Ron and Reggie Kray) are trying to establish their dominance in a lush mansion in the Serengeti. But a quartet of young interlopers, whom Hardy calls the Solaro brothers, are invading the boys' turf, hungry for blood, power, and to mate with any ovulating female nearby.
In a nod to the broader climate crisis, Hardy tells us that drought conditions have turned the savanna into a tinder easily consumed by fire. And so it happens: a sequence of flaming red skies backlit by the setting sun. The fires consume or displace the cheetahs' prey, and as the smoke moves hundreds of kilometers north, they form a mega herd of at least 1 million wildebeest plus thousands of zebras and buffalo, hesitantly sniffing the breeze. and pause in their southward migration to once nutritious grasslands. In terms of gangster drama, this mega pack is a drug shipment that feuding gangsters depend on.
Instead, hard times ravage the parched Serengeti. Cheetahs are forced to hunt hares which, although they run decently, will never outrun the fastest land mammals. In a moving moment, one of the Solaro brothers, a bag of bones who has not eaten for days, falls with a crash to the ground. As he lies breathing his last, the camera crew takes the close-up and we see a predatory hyena in the back of the shot. Neither the camera crew nor the park rangers intervene. Politics, Hardy tells us, is letting nature take its course.
When the rains come to the Serengeti, migrating mega herds follow, none of which presumably realize that they could soon become the cheetahs' main course. The stomachs of our brothers swell accordingly, the territorial war with the Solaro brothers comes to a truce and the danger.
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