In the streaming age, there is an obvious appetite for globe-trotting, multilingual thrillers such as Liaison. Starting in Syria, before crossing to France and Britain, via an encounter with Russian mercenaries and a heart-stopping moment at the Turkish border, it follows Vincent Cassel and Eva Green as they track hackers who have stolen information that is very, very important. But it is hard to work out who is in search of what in this convoluted mess of official government bodies, unofficial contractors – and Peter Mullan as a UK minister who spends too much time in what looks like the losers’ cafe from The Apprentice.
It opens in Damascus, with Gabriel (Cassel) careering around a drunken house party, before a flashy drone shot diverts our attention across town to a hacker working in an abandoned building. Naturally, the hacking goes down to the wire, but the hacker and his collaborator eventually escape and attempt to make their way to France, to let Europe know what terrible things they have uncovered when they were sneaking a look at Bashar al-Assad’s iCloud.
This is post-Brexit Europe, however, and Britain and France are not on the friendliest of terms. France would like to get their hands on the hard drive before anyone else does, but there is conflict between Sophie and Didier, both advisers to the president, who disagree over the best way to “extract” the Syrians and get hold of the goods. Sophie suggests the proper, DGSE intelligence agency route, while the suspiciously rogue Didier prefers to go off the books and use contractors, whose connection to the French may be denied if they are caught. Enter Gabriel, a man who is happiest lurking in dark corners, and who gets into forbidden buildings by wearing masks, pinching passes and generally looking as if he is entitled to be there.
During the extraction, the hackers are separated from Gabriel, undertake a traumatic journey and end up at Stansted, to which the obvious response is: haven’t they suffered enough? In poor old isolated Brexit Britain, the National Cyber Security Centre is run by a man named Mark Bolton, who appears so tech-illiterate he’d probably be delighted if an email addressed to Marckkk Bolt’on landed in his inbox to tell him there was a cheap Ray-Bans sale on.
The National Cyber Security Centre’s computer systems are taken over by a pop-up of a cartoon Puss in Boots dancing on Tower Bridge. Then some genuinely dangerous hacking stuff starts to happen. I write this as someone who is baffled by my wifi-connected thermostat, but, honestly, if you’re going to take everything online, at least have a backup. Sadly, London’s transport system and flood defences are an open goal and Marckkk Bolt’on has not a clue what to do about it. “We’re analysing the hex code to identify the file signature but that will take a little time,” he says, for a taster of the kind of dialogue we’re dealing with.
Enter the crack British political team of a minister of something, Richard Banks (a criminally wasted Mullan), and Alison (Green, thankfully nowhere near Hampshire or its peasants), who is a Spad, I think, though again it’s not entirely clear. Alison is dating a human rights lawyer, which comes in handy for this mess of a plot, but it also turns out that she has a deep secret connection to Gabriel, which is expressed by them staring at each other through rain-streaked windows, or trying not to kiss. That’s the liaison of the title, in case there wasn’t enough going on. Honestly, it is all such a weird jumble.
The idea that a nation’s entire infrastructure is susceptible to hacking is fascinating and would lend itself to a decent apocalyptic thriller. Anglo-French conflict in the post-Brexit age is also pretty meaty, particularly when dealing with the fallout of complex conflicts around the globe and the necessity of shared intelligence. But this ends up feeling cartoonish rather than tense. It’s gripping enough, if you like watching people chase each other around several countries while men with big guns shoot at them and Green sits in her car crying, but at best this is a serviceable espionage potboiler, and, with a cast this good, you would not be blamed for expecting it to be a bit better than so-so.
• Liaison is on Apple TV+ now.
