'Ray Donovan: The Movie' gives the show another crack at tying up loose ends

Two years after its abrupt cancellation without an actual ending, "Ray Donovan" gets the chance to clean up another mess with "Ray Donovan: The Movie," designed to provide the closure that longtime viewers lacked. There's some of that, but unlike the show's notorious fixer, it's not as neat a job as it could have been in terms of tying up loose ends.

Executive producer David Hollander directed what amounts to this extra-long finale episode and co-wrote it with star Liev Schreiber, who had promised fans some sort of payoff way back in February 2020. Now that it's here, credit Showtime with the customer-service savvy to provide both its talent and the audience with a more satisfying conclusion, one that reaches into the past in addition to advancing in the present.

For those who (understandably) forgot, the seventh season ended with a shootout that left Mickey (Jon Voight), the family's amoral patriarch, on the lam, and Smitty (Graham Rodgers), the husband of Ray's daughter Bridget (Kerris Dorsey), dead.