50/10
Featured in Graham Norton I liked: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)
Helen embarks on a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous underworld, Helen’s employer calls on Sam to protect her. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam buys his guns, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of the band The Damned.
Fairytale of New York Written by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Starring The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot, but ultimately failed to deliver on all it could have. With a top-notch cast, including Keira Knightley as a ninja-kicking, gun-toting action heroine and Ben Whishaw as her former mentor turned colleague, expectations were high. They are both agents of the secret mercenary espionage organisation called the Black Doves, whose handler is Sarah Lancashire, doing her best Judi Dench “M” impression in a hideous platinum blonde wig.
The trio were working together, but alone, seeking to expose a vast conspiracy
It certainly starts with a bang, as we see three young people killed in central London. There is a separate plot involving the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose central party daughter has also inconveniently disappeared, threatening all sorts of international political conflict. It is no surprise to see these two developments converge later, both storylines overlapping with the actions of Knightley and Whishaw, especially since she, as well as being married to the Government’s Defence Secretary, who himself was involved in the political fallout from the ambassador’s death, was also having a passionate affair with one of the three dead at the outset.
By the time it all gets sorted out by the end, I felt like it had fallen somewhere between James Bond-esque fantasy and Le Carré-esque realism, with escapism unfortunately winning out in the end
Several other characters are brought into the kaleidoscopic narrative, as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper into an increasingly inscrutable plot as a body count rises around them to mountainous proportions, occasionally at their hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Directed with precision and reliably acted by its A-list stars, for me it somehow failed to live up to its initial promise, floundering in an overstuffed plot that relied too heavily on coincidence, gun violence and quirky, eccentric characters. When I first started watching it, I felt inclined, almost for the first time, to watch all the remaining episodes, it looked good, but by episode 4 I fear the cracks were showing, which no amount of sharp dialogue and snappy jokes could make up for (and there were some good ones in there).
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It picked up again for a tense, thrilling finale, even if it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t seem to know exactly when to stop. It did eventually come to a halt, though, and even did so with a sort of “Die Hard”-type Christmas tie-in, but ultimately it all felt a bit too contrived, convoluted, and confusing to really work for me. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the biggest TV and streaming premieres of this month.
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