Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw deck the walls with gore in this violent, knowingly absurd and self-consciously Christmassy London-set spy thriller.
The six-part Netflix series from Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project) plays tongue-in cheek with familiar tropes and archetypes, from Knightley’s kick-ass, covert-operative mom to Whishaw’s troubled hitman to Sarah Lancashire’s imperious spymistress. The stars trade dry apercus with each other and crunchy blows with foes in dynamic action sequences.
It’s great, escapist fun and the wintry capital looks almost as gorgeous as Knightley’s sharpened, angular beauty and Whishaw’s elegant dishevelment. Part of the enjoyment, of course, lies in the subconscious awareness that it’s Elizabeth Bennett and Paddington offing baddies with shotguns and throwing knives.
The plot? Knightley’s Helen is the arch, elegant and super-capable wife of Tory defence secretary and likely future PM Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), with whom she has young twins. But wait: Helen, real name Daisy, has been placed in the relationship by a shadowy commercial espionage network called the Black Doves.
“We’re a capitalist operation not an ideological one,” purrs Lancashire’s Reed, recruiting Daisy in flashback, having spotted her raw talent. “Capitalism is an ideology,” Knightley cracks back.
Anyway, Helen’s civil servant lover has been killed along with a tabloid journalist and a shop assistant he had mysterious dealings with, and now dark forces are gunning for her.
So Reed rehires Sam – who trained Helen in combat before going freelance as a contract killer – to protect her and take the fight to the enemy. Meanwhile the Chinese ambassador is dead of a suspicious overdose and his party-girl daughter is missing, which may or may not (I’m three episodes in) be connected to the rival criminal gangs that Sam worked for and against.
Is anyone really watching for the plot, though? I think not. I think we’re watching it to see Knightley’s Helen bring a knife to a gunfight with two assassins or disable an SAS sniper with kitchen equipment while her children sleep upstairs.
I think we’re watching to see her reset a shoulder dislocated while jumping into a canal from an exploding apartment by slamming it into a brick wall. “Impressive,” mutters Whishaw’s Sam. “You should have seen me when I pushed two entire human beings out of my vagina on the same afternoon,” she ripostes, tartly.
Beneath the irony and the clichés, though, scriptwriter Barton is good on the layered nature of Helen’s betrayals and compromises, and the complexity of Sam. The fact that the “triggerman” is gay is relevant only insofar as his affection for his ex, Michael (Omari Douglas) makes him vulnerable.
Lancashire may be on autopilot (still better than many actors at full throttle) but there’s a richly villainous cameo from Kathryn Hunter as a gang boss, with the promise of Tracey Ullman to come.
The soundtrack is as nicely judged as the cinematography. I stopped watching to write this just after the intro to episode four, with Whishaw and two hitgirls, in an uneasy truce, wrapped in tinsel and santa hats and hauling artillery to a showdown with a drug gang, to the strains of Johnny Cash’s version of The Little Drummer Boy. Well, I don’t want to open all my Christmas presents at once, do I?
Netflix, streaming from December 5
