Sandy Strallen

Finally a grown up film dealing in a grown up way with the single biggest human lunacy - nuclear arms, the increasing liability for an accident or a rogue actor to threaten holocaust and the ultimate impotence of even the most powerful people in the world in the face of the unthinkable. Bigelow confronts us, provides no easy answer, no comfort and no anthemic resolution to let us sleep again. It’s awake up call and until we deal with these crazy existential threat starting with weapons of total annihilation, none of us should ever sleep again. A final scene of uncertainty, panic and utter desolate nihilistic banality of uncertain people piling on a bus going nowhere.

SlowHorses this ‘aint.. If there was a formula for the success of Slow Horses, the plodding, trite, woketastic dullards who thought they could replicate it in Black Doves were sorely mistaken. My depression in watching banality this abysmal is that rather like Eric Morecambe playing the piano for Andre Previn, all the right notes might have been there but this time absolutely not in the right order. Morecambe was both funny and clever and this violent drivel is neither. Highly strung, underwritten, over-acted and with limp subplotting and the usually entirely unbelievable performance from a paper-thin Kiera Knightley (in all senses) who has apparently more access to enormous guns in her knicker drawer than she does feelings for the man she was extra-maritally shagging who gets rubbed out in an incredibly unlikely hit from 450 metres away across the river Thames with pinpoint accuracy. This series is the ultimate result in pop-fiction finally consuming its own still-born babies. An entire sequence of Maguffins with absolutely no connecting tissue but plottery as agile and sophisticated as Enid Blyton and some usual suspect starry actors phoning it in having been ordered to watch Pulp Fiction and as much of Kill Bill they could stomach as homework prior to convening for day one of entirely too cozy rehearsals with a creative team so ineffably smug and self-congratulatory that it really should have been called The Fundaments. Oh and while I’m clearly loving every minute of this dross let me ask, entirely into the thin air(presumably) why has it become both trendy, de-rigeur and even god help us, sexy to portray psychopathic professional serial killers as demi-heroes? Furthermore, while no familial traditionalist, is it not grtting, well all a bit you know trope-tastic that only gays seem to be both witty and capable of having fun? Really? Does this reflect on the ‘creative’ teams ..or the audiences? Either way, i am not entirely sure I care for any answer as in any case nihilism without absurdism is, well, merely, well, empty. Entirely par for a very ordinary course and a sad reflection on just how appallingly low human-nature has slipped, certainly as far as what passes for entertainment. God the noise of boxes being ticked in current TV fiction is as deafening as the gratuitous shoot outs. Sarah Lancashire is apparently also in it but both wasted and badly directed. I have just discovered a whole new TV writing genre: psychobathos.

Beyond appalling exercise in mediocrity! Just say no kids and do not fall for the cynicism of the vertical marketing Koolaid tsunami which doubtless will follow up from the tax laundering hedge-funder producerswhosegreedy little printsare all over this mess of a ‘film’. Roald Dahl was witty, light-hearted and occasionally clever and a little dark. This was just… well… dark- dark enough to see the rigging wires from time to time it was so lazily cobbled together. With Gene Wilder as the ultimate role model you’d think that Chalamee might have found a scintilla of genuine weirdness. Sadly he was so busy stretching his five note vocal range, avoiding getting both left feet tangled in the uninspired extraography movement schtik and trying not to look like the Artful Dodger’s less talented somewhat minty cousin, to attempt to do anything else. The rest of the cast just phoned it in and took the money. With a script as dry and empty as this it is not surprising mugging and stereotypes was all that was left. Not even 1star.