Cruel Train

British TV dramas are sometimes pearls - good acting, psychological depth, ambiguous British morality combined not only once in strikingly good films, worth watching and more.

This is not the case with 'Cruel Train'. An adaptation of an Emile Zola novel, located in 1940 UK at war, this movie cannot decide what path to take - dark drama or detective story. The pace is too fast, too many things happen for a 90 minutes TV space, and characters do not have time to build credibility or to let us understand what is their motivation. Acting is not that good as we are used in other BBC dramas, and overall I remained with a bad taste after watching this brutal and sordid story.