Black Rabbit review – it’s almost impossible to care about Jude Law and Jason Bateman in this TV misery

The two actors play brothers dragged into danger by gangsters, but are too stupid or poorly sketched for you to sympathise with them. It’s a relentlessly cheerless watch

Hard on the heels of the airless misery of Mark Ruffalo’s new venture, Task, comes Jude Law and Jason Bateman’s Black Rabbit, which has a bit more action but the same relentless, cheerless tone and even less forgiving lighting. One more entry and it’s officially a trend! We’ll all have to schedule recovery viewings of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, like winter vitamin D shots, to make it through unbowed.

Law and Bateman are working-class brothers Jake (Law) and Vince (Bateman) Friedkin from Coney Island. They grew up in what we assume from relatively early on was a violent home, dominated by an alcoholic father. They became a Nirvana-lite rock group – Jake the handsome lead, Vince the drummer and creative force – until the latter’s taste for drugs and mayhem put paid to their success. Jake pivoted into management, primarily of multihyphenate talent Wes (Sope Dirisu), and when Vince regained his sobriety and vision and found a building that seized his imagination they all went into business together as restaurateurs, creating the Black Rabbit – a three-storey clubhouse that soon became the toast of bohemian New York.