Brief Story Line
Adam Lawrence (Charlie Cox - Daredevil TV series etc) was the deputy chief of British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 who was married with Maddy (Oona Chaplin - The Longest Ride etc) and had two kids. Due to unforeseen circumstances, Adam had to take over from Sir Martin Angelis (Ciarán Hinds - Red Sparrow, Belfast etc) as the chief while handling a possible threat to the country.
Unfortunately for Adam, a Russian spy who used to be his contact in the past named Kara (Olga Kurylenko - The Courier, Quantum of Solace etc) reappeared in London and resulted to a lot of chaos in his new role.
So how would the story conclude? You can find out in this series.
End of Brief Story Line
As I said above, one of the reasons that I decided to watch this was because of Charlie Cox as one of the lead cast. So it was kind of a surprise for me when I saw Cox' name not mentioned first in the opening credit, but put as "and" instead. Nevertheless, I had no problem as long as he was one of the main cast. When I read the brief synopsis on Netflix, I already knew that it would be a spy story. However, after half way through the first episode, I could see that this is a spy thriller and not the full action type.
Being a spy thriller, the focus was not on how the protagonist would investigate and went inside enemy's territory to fight against the villains, but rather how to influence assets to work in their favor. So as the story progressed with few suspenseful scenes, we would feel the intricacy of the plot grew more till the ultimate ending. And the fifth and final episode was pretty surprising to me with a shocking scene that I did not think would happen. It was actually a bit disappointing, but luckily the conclusion was pretty satisfying.
Looking at the opening and closing credits, I could not find anything the series based on which was actually kind of amazing. It was apparently created and written by Matt Charman who was the writer of critically acclaimed Bridge of Spies (as promoted in the poster of this series). The whole season only had 5 episodes with more or less 40 minutes duration that would not require too long to finish it. The pace in each episode was not really fast but it did have a bit of suspense in the early part of 2nd episode and the fifth episode. Not a lot of action here and even if there were, they were not the high intensity kind which might disappoint fans of Kurylenko and Cox, particularly if they were looking for them to show their skilled moves.
Aside from those two, Oona Chaplin also had a major role in here. Though at first her characterization might not be to the liking of audience, I find her subsequent development to be quite good. The highlight to me though was definitely Ciarán Hinds who was just perfect as the chief of MI6. There were also the appearances of other important characters such as Foreign Secretary Audrey Gratz (Alex Kingston - ER TV series etc), Maddy's old friend from the army, Dede (Tracy Ifeachor - Treadstone TV series etc), Adam's children Ella and Callum (Beau Gadson and Samuel Leakey) plus few others.
Overall this is a thriller that should be entertaining for people who prefer the use of psychological mind to influence assets, combined with some political agenda as the ultimate goal. It is not like 007 (though it was cheekily mentioned here) or any of those secret agents who had to use their fighting skills to defeat the bad guys. The action scenes were brief and not too frequent, but the intricacy of the plot were quite complex. Thing is, because of the not so high intensity in each episode, the series felt lacking in making me fully entertained. It was OK, but not a really memorable one without anything that really stood out. So, if you are into this sort of spy thriller genre, then you would be entertained by it, but if your preference is for something more action or more dramatic or truly complex, then this might not be suitable for you.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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