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‘M.I.A.’ on Peacock
The path to a South Florida drug-running enterprise may have its inspiration, at least thematically, in a money laundering operation located on the Lake of the Ozarks summer resort region in central Missouri.
“Ozark,” co-created by Bill Dubuque, was a crime drama series in which Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, as married couple Marty and Wendy Byrde, moved their family from a Chicago suburb to Osage Beach, Missouri, after laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel went amiss.
The snafu with the cartel put the Byrdes in the predicament of having to launder $500 million in five years, and to clear this massive debt they settled on a tourist area where they bought up businesses such as a bar, strip club, and riverboat casino.
The Peacock drama series “M.I.A.” is a crime thriller also created by Bill Dubuque, which leads to the notion that this story about drug-running in the Florida Keys is perhaps similar in concept to “Ozark.”
That’s like saying the “Mission: Impossible” films are too much like the James Bond or Jason Bourne films. Sure, there may be some truth to this analogy, but what matters here is whether “M.I.A.” offers enough compelling characters and story to follow down a familiar direction.
Arguably, the weight of an illicit family business falls on Etta Tiger Jonze (Shannon Gisela), when her entire family is murdered. As the first episode begins and ends with the voice of Etta saying “Killers aren’t born. They’re made,” violence is soon to follow with revenge on her mind.
In the beginning, all seems normal in the Florida Keys as the Jonze family marina offers sportfishing charters. Etta is first seen taking tourists on a boat tour of swamp land to spot alligators, while she entertains them as if they were on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland.
Daniel Jonze (David Denman) and his wife Leah (Danay Garcia), along with their two sons, run the Tiger-Jonze marina in Key Largo which is not generating wealth with just fishing expeditions and swamp tours.
Etta is not unfamiliar with the illicit family trade, and to her parents’ chagrin she wants to be a part of it, even though they have plans for her to enter college.
Considered the smartest member of the Jonze clan, Etta has a photographic memory that will serve her well if she ends up at the University of Miami. But she really wants to participate in the family side business of transporting drugs while outwitting pursuits by the DEA.
The Rojas cartel has been using the Jonze charter boats as drug mules for twenty years. However, change is coming because the cartel boss Isaac Rojas (Edward James Olmos) is facing the end of life.
The drug business now goes to the sons, Mateo (Maurice Compte), a natural born killer, and Samuel (Gerardo Celasco), who appears initially to lack the same ruthless instincts of his brother.
The brains of the cartel might be Elias Perez (Alberto Guerra), deemed the best enforcer in the cartel who proves to be so psychotic that he tosses a servant into Isaac’s coffin for burial at sea because the great khans of Mongolia did the same to secure care in the afterlife.
Meanwhile, the Rojas brothers must chart the course of the cartel, with Mateo insisting they need another revenue stream with a similar profit margin and Samuel reminding him that dealing narcotics is equally lucrative.
The next run by the Jonze family turns out to be problematic for several reasons. For one, the cartel demands an immediate delivery that usually takes weeks of planning to avoid detection by the authorities.
Much worse, the cartel decides to get into human trafficking of young girls. Etta’s moral code finds this repugnant, and her father bluntly tells that if she wants to be in the family business, “This is the life. We don’t make choices. We weigh the risk and live with it.”
These words about living with risk of a criminal enterprise prove to be prophetic, because a decision that Etta makes about transporting human cargo results in a deadly disaster for her family.
The killers figure wrongly that they annihilated the entire Jonze family, not considering that Etta was alive and free to put together her revenge list of twelve people she vows to kill.
After an unwelcome encounter, Etta gets rescued from the ocean by Haitian immigrant Lovely (Brittany Adebumola) and her neurodivergent brother Stanley (Dylan T. Jackson), and winds up with jobs at a Miami club and cleaning motel rooms while planning revenge.
Killing a bunch of bad dudes takes time, and in the meantime, we are treated to a series of subplots, like Etta get reunited with an aunt she never knew, striking up a romance with a college student, and working for a lady (Tovah Feldshuh) whose family perished in the Holocaust.
Shannon Gisela’s Etta is the selling point for “M.I.A.” as her likability factor is more than enough to get behind her revenge tour.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.