16/50
Helen embarks on a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught at gunpoint when her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous underworld, Helen’s employers call in Sam to protect her. Bing, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam sources his weapons, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of the band The Damned.. Featured on The Graham Norton Show: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024). A Fairy Tale of New York Written by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Performed by The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl. STAR RATING: ***** Excellent **** Very Good *** OK ** Poor * Terrible ‘Helen Webb’ (Keira Knightley) lives with her husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan), the Secretary of State for Defence, and their two children. Everything seems idyllic, until her former commanding officer Reed (Sarah Lancashire) returns to her life to inform her that her secret lover Jason (Andrew Koji) has been murdered, along with two others, causing her to relive her former life as a secret spy, on a course for revenge. Reed teams her up with Sam (Ben Whishaw), an assassin and her former trainer, and together they run a complex web of political espionage and assassination. The spy thriller has fallen out of favor for years, but one that still has the potential to work in new and different formats. Black Pigeons came out of nowhere, with a huge advertising campaign, to become the latest major Netflix production to top the charts, aiming to revive the genre in the modern era. The result is a truly mixed bag, one that holds your attention throughout its pleasantly concise eight episodes, but can’t really cover up the flaws in the script. All in all, it’s a pretty standard spy story, with some pretty standard cloak-and-dagger clichés that anyone familiar with old spy capers will recognize and even love to embrace. The big problem is the uneven tone. The script oscillates unevenly between tongue-in-cheek, tongue-in-cheek action comedy and dark, heavy spy thriller, leaving you too caught up in it to really take it in. It makes up for that, however, with some elegant, flashy action sequences, with Whishaw and Knightley making a convincing pair of mismatched professionals, supported strongly by Lancashire as the icy, self-effacing Type M commander. The spy thriller remains one with limitless possibilities, and Black Pigeons, despite its flaws, is a strong addition to the mainstays, with an interesting mystery at its heart, some strong performances, and a plot that fits. ***