Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. Reviews

The Outlaws season 2 review: no more funny business

By

The first season of Amazon’s The Outlaws had a bit of an identity crisis. Was it a serious thriller with silly characters or an ensemble comedy trying to be a crime drama?

Season 2 of The Outlaws has no such problem, and it delivers an increasingly tense, fast-paced conclusion to the lead characters’ saga that’s lighter on laughs but filled with strong performances and smart twists.

The cast of The Outlaws gathers in a room, wearing their community service vests.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Co-created and largely written by Emmy winner Stephen Merchant (The Office) along with Elgin James (Mayans M.C.), the British series picks up its sophomore arc exploring how the events of season 1 left the group of lead characters: Still serving community service together, but now unlikely allies united by a stolen bag of money. The new season forces them to confront the very real danger posed by their decision to keep the money, and they end up on the wrong side of the sadistic drug dealer who wants his money back — with interest. In order to pay him back and protect themselves and their loved ones, they need to get even more comfortable operating in the criminal underworld.

Recommended Videos

Season 1 of The Outlaws ended on a somewhat unsatisfying note, with the group finally showing solidarity but their lives still in very real jeopardy. In hindsight, the episode that ended that season feels more like a typical midseason finale, offering a tiny taste of what the characters could accomplish together while raising the stakes in the story to come.

Related

In contrast, season 2 delivers a thoroughly satisfying arc that effectively wraps things up for just about everyone in The Outlaws in one way or another — even when their concluding chapters suggest their stories aren’t quite over. It does so at a surprisingly efficient pace, too, with the season’s six episodes rarely detouring into the smaller, funny subplots that peppered season 1.

Right from the start, season 2 is full-speed ahead on the characters’ descent into criminal life and the rapid unraveling of their lives the deeper they go.

The cast of The Outlaws smiles at something off-camera.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

While this shift in tone makes season 2 of The Outlaws a significantly less funny experience, it does deliver an extremely compelling, tense narrative, darker than just about anything Merchant has worked on so far. As crime thrillers go, The Outlaws checks all the boxes and offers a little something extra with the humor Merchant and the cast provide along the way.

Season 2 continues to do a nice job of spreading the screen time around, too. Where the first season of The Outlaws bounced the characters off each other in entertaining ways, the second season spends more time diving into their respective solo arcs, exploring how the people and events transpiring around them have changed them — and not always for the better.

At the end of season 1, the characters were fascinating together. When season 2 ends, they’re just as fascinating individually, too.

Christopher Walken uses an iron in a scene from season 2 of The Outlaws.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Although Christopher Walken got top billing — and deservedly so — to launch the series, the Oscar winner takes a bit of a backseat in season 2, getting involved in less of the action, but still delivering a great performance when given the chance. His costars all step up admirably, and it’s difficult to call out any particular performance above the others due to how wonderful each actor is in the series and the excellent chemistry they show with each other. Alongside Walken and Merchant, Rhianne Barreto, Darren Boyd, Clare Perkins, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Gamba Cole all get time to shine in season 2 and take full advantage of the opportunity.

Joining them, Jessica Gunning (Back), who plays the group’s community-service supervisor, delivers some of the show’s biggest laughs across both seasons, while Claes Bang (The Northman) gives the season a truly terrifying villain as the drug dealer known only as The Dean.

More satisfying than the season that preceded it, season 2 of The Outlaws does a great job of exploring the world it introduced in season 1 and fully realizing the paths the story put its characters on. Anyone who left season 1 feeling a bit underserved by the series will likely find the show’s second — and possibly final — set of episodes more rewarding, even without as many laughs.

Season 2 of The Outlaws premieres August 5 on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.

The Outlaws (2021)

The Outlaws
7.6/10
2 Seasons
Genre
Comedy, Crime, Drama
Stars
Christopher Walken, Stephen Merchant, Darren Boyd
Created by
Stephen Merchant, Elgin James
Watch on Amazon

Editors’ Recommendations

Movie images and data from:
Rick Marshall
Rick Marshall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
I Love My Dad review: Patton Oswalt in a catfish cringe comedy
Patton Oswalt looks at James Morosini in a car in I Love My Dad.

“The following actually happened,” insists the epigraph of I Love My Dad. For laughs and good measure, more words follow: “My dad asked me to tell you it didn’t.” Veracity is one major hook of this tenderly awkward cringe comedy from writer-director-star James Morosini, which tells a true story of such deeply misguided, debatably well-meaning parental deception that it being true only compounds the queasy fascination. Of course, the promise that everything you’re seeing is based on real events is also an invisible shield, isn’t it? No matter how much fictionalizing has taken place, stamping a story as true helps deflect any potential complaints about elements that ring false or might otherwise inspire skepticism. And I Love My Dad has a few of those.

To hear Morosini tell it, he was 19 years old when he fell for an elaborate internet ruse. The culprit: his father, dubbed Chuck here and played by the stand-up comic Patton Oswalt. At the start of the film, Franklin (Morosini as a younger version of himself) has grown so fed up with Chuck’s lies and excuses and general deadbeat inability to be where he promises he’ll be that he’s completely cut his divorced dad out of his life, blocking all methods of phone and social media contact.

Read more
Bodies Bodies Bodies review: a viciously funny horror comedy
Bee, Sophie, Jordan, and Alice stand in the dark together in Bodies Bodies Bodies.

Bodies Bodies Bodies, the new film from Dutch director Halina Reijn, may offer more than its fair share of mangled and bloody corpses, but its gnarliest moments have nothing to do with death or murder. Instead, the new A24 horror comedy ultimately cares less about the deaths of the characters it traps in its suitably spooky mansion and more about burning the images they have of themselves to the ground. Thanks to its ensemble of social media-obsessed Gen Z narcissists, Bodies Bodies Bodies’ decision to prioritize social death over literal death proves to be well-founded.

Over the course of its tight 95-minute runtime, the film sends its characters spiraling down their own rabbit holes of paranoia and desperation until there’s nothing left for them to do but blame each other for the difficult situations they’ve found themselves in. For that reason, Bodies Bodies Bodies tends to be at its best and most biting when it isn't operating as a standard slasher movie, but rather as a kind of nightmarish new take on Clue for the TikTok generation.

Read more
Persuasion review: a messy adaptation of a timeless story
The Elliot and Musgrove sisters look through a window together in Netflix's Persuasion.

Persuasion often goes too far in its attempts to modernize a story that, frankly, has yet to lose its timeless appeal. The new film from director Carrie Cracknell is a feature-length adaptation of Jane Austen’s last completed novel, but it diverges from the language and style of its source material. While it maintains its period setting, Persuasion goes out of its way to rework the storytelling of Austen’s novel for 21st-century audiences. Its efforts to do so result in characters often throwing out lines like “He’s a 10. I never trust a 10,” or “Now we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.”

These lines, which awkwardly strain to recapture the tone of modern dating language, clunkily stick out like a sore thumb in Persuasion. At their best, they reek of misguided desperation. At their worst, they feel like failed attempts to cleverly update a novel written by one of history’s most seminal and observant voices. Beyond its frequent uses of modern slang, Persuasion also employs a Fleabag-esque fourth-wall-breaking narrative structure that feels tailor-made to appeal to all the viewers out there who will go into it looking for snarky new eye-rolling gifs to use on Twitter.

Read more