On December 5th, the British spy thriller «Black Doves» was released on Netflix, featuring Keira Knightley portraying a spy avenging her lover’s murder. The show’s creators are so confident in its success that they announced a second season long before its premiere in August. But is such confidence justified? Let’s dive into the review below.
Pluses:
a rather interesting main storyline, which concerns the character of Keira Knightley and has a reasonable intrigue; the presence of tense moments (which, however, alternate with frankly superfluous ones and even get lost against their background);
Minuses:
The script absolutely needs a good squeeze; hence, there is too much excess in the story; a lot of drawn-out uninteresting dialogues; little dynamics; not enough well-staged, spectacular fight scenes; too many plot conventions and illogic, some of which look ridiculous;
«Black Doves»
Genre spy thriller
Showrunner Joe Barton
Cast Keira Knightley, Sarah Lancashire, Ben Whishaw, Andrew Koji, Andrew Buchan, Omari Douglas, Kathryn Hunter, Sam Troughton, Ella Lily Hyland, Adam Silver, Ken Nwosu, Gabriel Crieve, Adil Akhtar, Tracey Ullman, Finn Bennett, Luther Ford, Isabella Wei
Premiere Netflix
Release Year 2024
Website IMDb
Helen Webb — at first glance, a loving wife to British high official Wallace Webb, mother of two. However, they’re clueless that she’s an agent of the private spy organization «Black Doves», which works for «those who pay more», not her country’s interests.
When Helen learns from her stern, school principal-like curator that her lover has been killed, and she might be in danger, her old friend, mercenary Sam Young, is sent to protect her. The situation is complicated by a political crisis unfolding against the backdrop of a Chinese minister’s death and ensuing tensions between Great Britain and the USA on one side, and China on the other.
With Sam’s support, Helen embarks on investigating her beloved’s death, concluding it might be tied to political games. Meanwhile, our characters will face a powerful influential force, setting the stage for truly dramatic spy escapades against gloomy London backdrops.
As of writing this text, the critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 97% «fresh» based on 33 reviews. However, after watching the show, it feels like those critics have seen something spy-related for the first time in their lives, making it a revelation. Although, there’s nothing particularly outstanding or unconventional here.
If anyone was expecting a thrilling and extremely tense spy thriller in its purest form, they are bound to taste the bitterness of disappointment. The plot unforgivably disperses across unnecessary arcs, scenes, dialogues, characters, and even genres.
Amid bloody murders, several sinister extras with guns, and supposedly funny phrases like «order a double gin and tonic and let’s start killing, b*tch», there exists a delicate melodramatic storyline of a gay killer. Well, a hitman also has the right to happiness, by the way. Yes, he’s a ruthless killer, but the character must be relatable because he’s a homosexual with a broken heart. And with a humanitarian code — just a deadly sweetheart all in one. But it doesn’t work because character depth matters more than sexual orientation. And the dull character played by Ben Whishaw is just bland.
This handsome guy barely gets to have sex with the first person he meets when Keira Knightley’s character starts handing out punches to foes in the debut episode. Later, the narrative takes on a stable non-linearity, but not only are the numerous and not so mandatory flashbacks annoyingly distracting from the main events, but they also risk further burdening and confusing the viewer.
We flash back 10 years and see how a beautiful unmarried woman joins the «Doves». They try hard to show us how smart, educated, and sharp she is, and so on. But in the current timeline, this smart lady and her fragile partner fall for such a primitive and elementary trap (finding a cartridge case with fingerprints) that it’s just embarrassing for them.
And there’s a whole bag of laughable cliches and illogicalities in Joe Barton’s script. Believing that the protagonist’s husband is a complete idiot who can’t see beyond his own nose is still plausible. But believing that the aforementioned gay has a superhero ability to dodge bullets, especially in a close-range shootout, is hardly likely.
It might be worth reminding that Barton’s previous work was another unpretentious spy nonsense «The Union» on the same Netflix, but at least it didn’t make you waste over 5 hours in front of the screen.
Comparisons to «John Wick», which are somehow floating in the air, look utterly inappropriate. «Black Doves» lacks even a tenth of the dynamics of the Keanu Reeves’ shooters, plus they can’t even come close to matching their combat choreography and overall action scene quality. Indeed, a menacing authoritative grandma in a pub or a pale shootout in a neon-lit nightclub is far from «John Wick».
For the most part, the show is dialogic, not action-packed; however, the dragged conversations between not so interesting characters are hard to call captivating. Particularly annoying are the typical intimidation lines for perhaps housewives — «you don’t know who you’re dealing with» — ominously hisses a voice from the phone. Or, for instance, «you’re already dead, you just don’t know it yet» — warns one of the goons. But anyone hearing such verbal porn on this side of the screen well understands that such cheap atmospheric buildup is nothing more than empty noise.
The series also suffers from tonal inconsistency. One moment it pretends to be a tense spy-political thriller with a detective intrigue about an international scandal among «nuclear superpowers». Another, it tries to come off as a pseudo-playful caper about criminal squabbles in London in the style of Guy Ritchie. Moreover, the authors don’t forget to season the bland action with jokes, but they misfire. All these heterogeneous elements coexist poorly together.
Joe Barton’s script desperately needed a good squeeze: remove all the unnecessary moments, and it could have been an interesting feature film. Instead, it turned out to be a mediocre show about everything and nothing at the same time, in which one of the episodes is titled «Time to Light Up», yet no one here really manages to ignite.
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