Starring: Graham Norton and guests: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)
Line of Events
Helen begins a passionate romance 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 guns, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of classic punk band The Damned.
Fairy Tale of New YorkWritten by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowanStarred by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised much, but ultimately failed to deliver on all it could have achieved. With a cast that included Keira Knightley as the kick-ass ninja and gun-toting action heroine, as well as Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. They are both agents of a secret mercenary spy organisation called the Black Doves, whose handler is Sarah Lancashire, who does her best to emulate Judi Dench’s “M” with a terrible platinum blonde wig.
The trio worked together, but separately, trying to expose a vast conspiracy
It certainly starts off with a bang as we see three young people disappear in central London. There is a separate story revolving around the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to the UK, whose daughter, the protagonist of the party, has also sadly disappeared, threatening all sorts of international political conflict. It’s no great surprise that the two events later converge – both stories overlapping the actions of Knightley and Whishaw, not least because she, in addition to being the wife of a government defence minister who found herself caught up in the political fallout of the ambassador’s death, also had a passionate affair with one of the three killed early on.
When it all came together at the end, I felt like the film was somewhere between James Bond-style fantasy and Le Carré-style realism, with escapism sadly triumphing in the end
Various other characters are dragged 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 hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Well directed and featuring believable stellar performances, it somehow failed to live up to its initial promise in my opinion, relying on an overstuffed plot that relied too much on coincidences, gunfight violence, and odd, offbeat characters. When I started watching it, I felt like for the first time in my life, watching all the other episodes, it seemed so good, but I fear that around episode four, the cracks started to appear that no matter how much cutting dialogue and snappy jokes could make up for it (and there were some good ones in there).
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It picked up the pace again, building to a tense and exciting finale, even if it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t know when to stop. It did happen in the end, though, and even managed to do so with a Die Hard-style Christmas tie-in, but in the end it all felt too contrived, convoluted, and confusing to really resonate with me.