12/15
In The Graham Norton Show: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)
Plot
Helen embarks on a passionate affair with a man who doesn’t know her secret identity. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous criminal underworld, Helen’s employer enlists Sam to protect her. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam gets his guns, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of The Damned.
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot but ultimately didn’t quite deliver
Fairytale of New YorkWritten by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowanStarring The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. With a stellar cast including Keira Knightley as a gun-toting ninja action heroine and Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both are agents of the ultra-secret mercenary spy organisation called Black Doves, whose controller is Sarah Lancashire, who is doing her best Judi Dench «M» impersonation with a horrible platinum blonde wig.
The trio were working together but alone, seeking to uncover a grand conspiracy
The film certainly starts with a bang, as we see three young people killed in central London. There is another strand of the plot that takes into account the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose daughter, a member of the Central Party, has also inopportunely disappeared, threatening all sorts of international political conflict. It is not surprising to see these two developments converge later, the two stories overlapping with the actions of Knightley and Whishaw, not least because she, in addition to being married to the government’s defence minister, himself caught up in the political fallout of the ambassador’s death, was herself having a passionate affair with one of the three killed early on.
By the time it all comes together at the end, I felt like the series was somewhere between James Bond-style fantasy and Le Carré-style realism, with escapism unfortunately winning out in the end
Various other characters are introduced into the kaleidoscopic narrative, as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper and deeper into an increasingly unfathomable plot while a body count piles up around them and around them in mountainous proportions, sometimes at their hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Tightly directed and with credible acting from its A-list stars, for me it failed to live up to its initial promise, spiralling out of control on an overstuffed plot that relied too much on coincidence, violent shootouts and eccentric, offbeat characters. When I first started watching it, I wanted, for almost the first time in my life, to binge-watch all the remaining episodes, it looked good, but around episode 4 I feared the cracks were starting to show, which no amount of sharp dialogue and quick jokes could compensate for (and there were some good ones).
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The show picked up for a tense and exciting finale, even if it leaned heavily on exposition and didn’t really seem to know when to stop. However, it eventually did, and even did it with a «Die Hard»-style Christmas tie-in, but in the end it all felt a little too contrived, convoluted, and confusing to really work for me.
