22/43
Starring The Graham Norton Show: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jaylen Ngonda (2024)
Chronology
Helen begins a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught at a crossroads when her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous underworld, Helen’s employer calls on Sam to protect him. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam gets his guns, is played by Rat Scabies from The Damned.
A Story of New York Written by Jem Finer, Shane McGowan Starring The Pogues & Kirsty McCall
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot, but ultimately fell short of what it could have been. With a stellar cast including Keira Knightley as the ninja-kicking, gun-wielding action hero and Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both are employees of the top-secret mercenary spy organization Black Doves, led by Sarah Lancashire, who does her best to portray Judi Dench’s «M» impersonation in a hideous platinum blonde wig.
The trio were working together, but alone, trying to uncover some grand conspiracy
It certainly starts with a bang, as we see three young men murdered in central London. There’s a separate plot thread involving the death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose partisan daughter has also gone missing, threatening all sorts of international political discord. It’s no surprise that these two events later converge, both stories overlapping with Knightley and Whishaw’s activities, especially since she not only married the government’s defense minister but was also embroiled in a political battle over the ambassador’s death, and she had a passionate affair with one of the three initially killed.
By the time it was all resolved by the end, I felt like it was somewhere between James Bond-style fantasy and Le Carre-style realism, and the escapism unfortunately won out in the end
Other characters enter the kaleidoscopic narrative as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper and deeper into an increasingly unfathomable plot, with mountain-sized bodies gathering around them and around them, sometimes in their arms, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Sharply directed, with an A-list star cast in authentic performances, it somehow failed to deliver on its early promise, flying through an overloaded plot that relied too much on coincidence, gun violence, and strange, offbeat characters. When I started watching, I thought most of the remaining episodes seemed good at first, but I’m afraid by episode 4, cracks were starting to appear that no amount of sharp dialogue and quick banter could make up for (and there were some good ones).
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Again, the tense and exciting ending kept me going, even if it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t seem to know when to stop. It even had a Die Hard-style Christmas tie-in, but in the end it all felt too contrived and complicated to really work for me. «One Hundred Years of Solitude» is one of the biggest TV and streaming premieres of the year.