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Lots of talk here about how the female lead is miscast and a bad actor but it's the character she plays that is so off-key. As a ruthless, amoral, lying, worked-obsessed MI6 agent responsible for the deaths of innocent people, she is so totally unlikeable we are all left rooting for a ruthless, amoral, lying, worked-obsessed hitman who will kill anyone for the right price or to keep his identity hidden.

But her character just doesn't ring true, and her life so often overshadows the action and the Jackal, this otherwise taut thriller makes you want to fast forward through many of the episodes. Eddie Redmayne does a fine job, even though I doubted his casting before I started watching, but this otherwise good series left me hankering to watch the original movie, which by all accounts is a classic this flawed series just doesn't match.

Mobland is an enthralling, blood-drenched roller coaster ride through London's mob families battling for supremacy. A great cast balances ruthless brutality with the trials and traumas of family life. Hard to decide who gets the best actor award - Pierce Brosnan's decaying criminal patriarch, Helen Mirren's psychotic Lady Macbeth, or Tom Hardy's understated ever-cool fixer - but the twists and suspense keep hammering away until the end.

And that's where the series fails. After the gripping reality of the first half, it wanders down the Marvel path with Tom Hardy's character pulling off superhero feats, middling action triller stuff, but it's the ending, setting everything up for a second series, that left me groaning.

No spoilers from me, but some unnecessary characters and clumsy plot devices, not to mention failing to tie up dramatic loose ends, forced me to write this review. All I'll say is I long for a single, self-contained, honest storyline, with no unsatisfactory endings just so they can milk it for as long as they can.

I knew this was going to be a violent action movie but it was billed as a comedy, so I thought why not, it can't be that bad.

What kind of sick puppy finds someone being stabbed, shot, bashed, mutilated and tortured funny? A fun outing for psychopaths and sadists maybe. This guy would have been dead a half hour into the movie, which is where it should have ended. I've seen the plot - nerdy guy falls for beautiful girl not what she seems to be - before, too. Don't waste your time.