11/26
Appearances in The Graham Norton Show: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)
Chronology
Helen begins a passionate affair with a man who has no idea of her secret identity. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous underworld, Helen’s employer calls in Sam to protect her. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam buys his weapons, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of the band The Damned.
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot but ultimately fell short
Fairytale of New York Written by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Performed by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. With a cast that included Keira Knightley as a kicking ninja, gun-toting action heroine, as well as Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both are agents of a secret mercenary spy organisation called the Black Doves, whose controller is Sarah Lancashire, doing her best to imitate Judi Dench’s “M” in a hideous platinum blonde wig.
The trio were working together but separately, trying to expose some grand conspiracy
It certainly starts with a bang, as we see three young people go missing in central London. There’s a separate storyline involving the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to the UK, whose daughter, at the centre of the party, also unfortunately disappears, threatening all sorts of international political conflicts. It’s no great surprise that these two events later converge, both stories overlapping with the doings of Knightley and Whishaw, not least because she, in addition to being the wife of a government defence minister who himself becomes embroiled in the political fallout of the ambassador’s death, was also having a passionate affair with one of the three killed at the start.
When it all came together at the end, I felt the film fell somewhere between James Bond-style fantasy and Le Carre-style realism, with the escapism unfortunately winning out in the end
Various other characters are drawn into the kaleidoscopic narrative as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper into an increasingly incomprehensible plot, while the body count around them grows to mountainous proportions, sometimes at their own hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Sharply directed with credible star performances, it somehow failed to live up to its early promise in my opinion, riding on an overstuffed plot that relied too heavily on coincidences, violent shootouts and odd, unconventional characters. When I started watching it, I was tempted to watch all the other episodes for the first time in my life, it seemed so good, but I’m afraid that around episode four, the cracks started to show that no amount of stilted dialogue and quick-fire jokes could compensate for (and there were some good ones).
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It picked up the pace again, building to a tense and exciting ending, even if it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t know when to stop. But it did eventually happen, and even managed to do so with a Die Hard-style Christmas tie-in, but ultimately it all felt too artificial, convoluted, and confusing to really resonate with me.
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