This 6-part Netflix spy-thriller promised much but ultimately didn't quite fulfil all it might've. With a top cast including Keira Knightley as a ninja-kicking, gun-toting action heroine, ditto Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both of them are operatives for the top-secret mercenary espionage organisation called Black Doves, whose controller is Sarah Lancashire, doing her best Judi Dench "M" impersonation in a dreadful platinum blonde wig.
It certainly starts with a bang as we see three young people killed in Central London. The trio were working together but alone, seeking to expose some grand conspiracy. There's a separate plot strand which takes in the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose party-central daughter has also inconveniently disappeared, threatening all sorts of international political strife. It's no great surprise to see these two developments converging later on, both stories overlapping with Knightley and Whishaw's doings, not least because she, besides being married to the Government's Minister of Defence, himself caught up in the political fall-out over the ambassador's death, was herself also having a passionate affair with one of the three killed at the start.
Various other characters are brought into the kaleidoscopic narrative, as Knightley and Whishaw get drawn deeper and deeper into an ever-more inscrutable plot while a body count builds up around and about them of mountainous proportions, occasionally at their hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance.
Sharply directed with credible playing by its starry A-listers, for me, it somehow failed to deliver on its early promise, flying away on an overloaded plot which relied too much on coincidence, shoot-'em-up violence and quirky, offbeat characters.
By the time it's all resolved at the end, I felt it had fallen somewhere between James Bond-type fantasy and Le Carre-type realism, with the escapism unfortunately winning out in the end.
When I started viewing it I felt inclined, for almost the first time ever, to binge watch all the remaining episodes, it seemed that good, but by about episode 4, I'm afraid the cracks were showing, for which no amount of sharp dialogue and quick quips could compensate (and there were some good ones in there).
It did pick up again for a tense and exciting finish even if it relied a lot on exposition and didn't seem to quite know when to stop. However it eventually did and even did so with a "Die Hard"-ish type Christmas-time tie-in but ultimately it all felt a bit too contrived, convoluted and confusing to really work for me.
