17/50
Helen begins a passionate affair with a man who has no idea of her secret identity. When her lover falls victim to London’s dangerous underworld, Helen is caught at gunpoint and her employer asks Sam for protection. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam buys his guns, is played by Rat Scabies, a member of the band The Damned. On The Graham Norton Show: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024). A fairytale about New York Written by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Performed by The Pogues & I’m Kirsty MacColl. STAR RATING: ***** Great **** Very good *** Okay ** Bad * 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 commander Reed (Sarah Lancashire) returns to her life and informs her that her secret lover Jason (Andrew Koji) has been murdered along with two other people, prompting her to relive her former life as a secret agent-spy, on a quest for revenge. Reed puts her in touch with Sam (Ben Whishaw), an assassin and her former trainer. Together they run a complex network of political espionage and murder. The spy thriller hasn’t enjoyed much popularity for years, but it still has the potential to work in new and different formats. «Black Pigeons» came out of nowhere, launched with a huge advertising campaign and catapulted to the top of the charts as the latest major Netflix production, aiming to revive the genre in the modern era. The result is a true mishmash that holds attention throughout its pleasantly concise eight episodes, but can’t really mask the script’s weaknesses. All in all, it’s a fairly standard spy story with some fairly standard cliches surrounding espionage and detective work that anyone familiar with old spy stories will recognize and even happily embrace. The big problem is the uneven tone. The script vacillates between a tongue-in-cheek action comedy and a gritty, heavy spy thriller, leaving you too engrossed in the film to really understand it. However, this is made up for by some elegant, eye-catching action sequences, with Whishaw and Knightley making a convincing pair of unlikely pros, with strong support from Lancashire as the ice-cold, aloof Type-M commander. The spy thriller remains one with unlimited possibilities, and despite its weaknesses, Black Pigeons is a strong addition to the main film. It has an interesting mystery at its heart, and the actors are strong and the action to match. ***