Mirage

The glitzy ex-pat middle east is a big turn off and of course it is a major character as most locations tend to be. But if you can focus past that and get into the emotional heart of the characters then you have some chance of engagement in the thriller aspects of the plot. Marie-Josée Croze, the female lead, holds the screen very well, though some of her motivations were a bit far fetched at times. Clive Standen does tough guy running, fighting, safe breaking, driving dangerously all very well but the emotional close ups are not his forte. Considering this was a coproduction between Euro heavyweights it was not a spectacular success, but remains good, solid viewing that improves as you move through the 6 episodes. Clearly set up for a follow- up series, lets see if they get the cash. I'm sure the cast would like to do it all again.

I had some high hopes for this TV show. The previews looked good so I decided to watch. But I was so angry at how they portrayed the female lead. She is shown to be weak and not very intelligent despite the fact that she is a cyber security engineer. When her first husband is fighting an attacker armed with a knife and gun , instead of helping him clobber the guy, she cowers in a corner until it's over. She is careless about leaving her electronic devices around for enemies to find and place monitor devices on them. Yet she is a cyber security expert. She opens up to a relative stranger about reconnecting with her long lost husband even though she knows the bad guys are trying to locate him. So, of course, this woman, who is wired with a mic, is relaying all this info to the bad guys. They know to follow her now to get to him. Why do these writers/producers continue to portray women as helpless, weak and dumb in films and on TV? Aren't we beyond that by now?

Frankly, I started way it without any expectation. Just the storyline seemed intriguing. I know there are some plot holes, but considering the budget and production house it's pretty decent outcome. Stars gave solid performance, the locations were eye catching. Story of global corporate espionage ring added with a long lost love interest added the spice that was needed to carry the show.

Might not be a HBO/Netflix/Prime production standard but considering everything, it was decent. May be more than decent! Figure it out !

Clive Standen's eyes are too close together and that's about the best thing I can say about this mess! As another reviewer said, the main chick, who is supposed to have a high-powered job seems never to be at work, the son is a pouting little oik and everyone else is surplus to requirements. His Aussie accent is passable.

In the trivia section of this series, following information is given:

"The first TV series produced and released as part of The Alliance, a co-production agreement announced in 2018 between European broadcasting groups France Télévisions (France), Rai (Italy) and ZDF (Germany) in order to pool resources and fund ambitious productions to compete with original productions from American streaming services such as Netflix."

if these European giants come together to produce something that is too hard to bear like this one, they shall as well close the shope and leave..

it was tooo bad..

i watched it french dubbed.. it was even more bad.. i assume in the english original some parts are in english, some parts are in french.. so what they did is they only dubbed the parts where english is spoken.. by a dubbing artist other than the leading actress!!! so what happens is suddenly her voice changes as the scenes flow as she swicthes from english to french and vice versa..

and the production, script qualities match the dubbing quality.. such an epic failure!!! such a big flop!!