Espionage/spy/assassin movies have always been an absolute favourite of mine, from the earliest memories of James Bond through to Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne, movies like Shooter, Day of the Jackal (original) and The Jackal, Leon the Professional, and the list goes on.
This is just another great series in a long list of great shows. With Eddie Redmayne at the helm, and seriously he is phenomenol, this show is great. I have worked with guns most of my life, been around guns all of my life and personally possess armourers licenses for firearms - its very easy to see they brought in subject matter experts and military persons to consult on this show. It definitely creates authenticity...which is a damn nice thing to see.
The entire cast seem to flow quite well together...except one. I first saw Lashana Lynch in the most recent James Bond and to be honest, i didnt regard her performance as anything special. In fact i thought she was terrible. Unlike previous female actors of colour (if thats what the intention was), and lets just go there shall we, she fell far short of the mark compared to the exquisite Halle Berry or even the legendary Grace Jones. She felt wooden, flat, uninspiring, frankly meritless and talentless.
But I thought maybe she just sucked in James Bond, "give her another go". But 5 episodes down...she just sucks. I dont know what her job was before acting, but she might want to consider going back to it.
I think the casting choice for Lashana Lynch was frankly bad.
Personally Idris Elba would have been a supremely good choice as the MI6 agent. If you need a british woman of colour, Christine Adams is great! Hell what about Thandiwe Newton SHES FANTASTIC!!! So many great choices and they picked a cardboard cutout.
If you can essentially ignore the utterly hopeless Lashana Lynch, the show is great. Its unfortunate that this will be a mini series, and not a multi season show which would have been something special. I think Eddie Redmayne should seriously consider other espionage style movies tv shows as he is fascinating to watch and this show would get a 10/10 if it werent for the terrible casting choice of Lynch.
