framersqool

Okay, start with a half-dozen impossibly hip jet-set euro-yuppies of no visible means of support, who have formed some 'collective' (use your imagination) in order to, um, fight fake news or something.

A boyfriend of one decides to quit his restaurant job and 'be a reporter', and careens down to deepest-darkest Africa (with thousands in cash at the ready to hand around like candy, naturally, to the locals) so he can save the world with The Truth from... what (of course) turns out to be The Russians. Our hero then is utterly blindsided by the happenstance that The Russians are way better at chasing white yuppies down in the streets of Kinshasa (the city they basically own, we're to believe), than he is at outrunning them.

Next Time On The Kollective, presumably, more of the same.

I'm not sticking around to find out. Comic book superheroes bore me, especially the left-leaning ones acting out there Wikileaks Wannabe fantasies in other people's countries where they are not particularly welcome to begin with, even when armed with The Truth....

What. Eh. Varr.

Seriously, how many worn-out CIA cliches do these people think is required, every, single, time, somebody with a story pitch about America's most treasonably incompetent public agency manages to bribe some banker into producing yet another Tom Clancy knockoff? I won't even go into all the rubber-stamped story elements and copy-pasted characters this insuting comic book needs to rely on, because anyone who ever saw any American production making even passing mention of these Criminally Inept Airheads down at Langley has seen them all before, again and again and again. And not a one of them that I can recall bothers to include how CIA's primary order of business is squandering countless billions on setting up an American people they know nothing about to be blindsided, once again, by misdeeds from enemies they themselves had cultivated, to give themselves something to do all day. Adding in Richard Gere playing the part of, as usual, Richard Gere, really is little more than adding insulting my intelligence (which the real-world CIA has not a shred of and would not know how to find any if it were delivered to them like so much office-party pizza), to the injury to my patience and my grasp of actual history which would be sure to follow if I gave this probably AI-generated script any more of my time than the one episode I managed to endure, before realizing, wait, I've seen this all before. Over and over and over again.

As relationship dramas go, this one has a lot to offer, if decent acting, some interesting-enough characters, a passably-chic soundtrack, and a halfway colorful variety of settings, are enough for you.

But as crime drama, I have to call this a total failure, on a number of levels, both legal and cultural. The numerous and continual built-in flaws, owing to little more than poor script research, just get more and more discrediting, as an otherwise workable and even compelling story develops, while teetering ever closer to falling flat on its face.

Other reviewers here have covered the questions of trying to justify murder by its motives here quite well, and all I can add to these is to say that this is quite openly yet another entry in the violence-against-women propaganda genre which has run up so much mileage of late, with the curious twist of murder being apparently justified by a woman when she had never been the victim of any violence.

Such are the elastic and imaginative definitions in vogue, of what exactly is violence against women, I suppose.

But ironically, this itself is the least of this valiant and moderately entertaining dramatic failure's problems.

As a longtime fan of British crime drama, more than familiar with the standard lingo and mindsets of the form, it was beyond conspicuous to me here that someone set out to somehow superimpose a British murder mystery into a purely American story, leaving out the mystery part altogether, and adding in a couple-three authentically British characters to make up for it, or something. And not very effectively.

Whoever did the background research for the dialect coaches and script consultants apparently doesn't know that no self-respecting Yank (especially an NYPD homicide detective) says 'holiday' when they mean 'vacation', no tattooed biker-ish New Yorker of a handyman uses the term 'she never said' when he means 'she didn't mention it', etc, etc.

Such everyday British-isms coming out of the mouths of solidly American characters distort these performances throughout the story, not to mention that a lady from Wales who's spent exactly one year in the USA hailing cabs in the Big Apple doesn't exactly hop into a left-drive high-performance sports car and go racing down the California highway on the spur of a stressful moment without the least hesitation or disorientation, on what has for a lifetime been to her the wrong side of the road....

And even that ain't the half of the un-thoroughness of how this story is composed. It does get worse.

The crime the whole story is about is committed not only in California, but also on federal land, in a national park administered by the US Dept of the Interior, which in the real world of American interagency federalism would set off a cascading labyrinth of jurisdictional, statutory and procedural considerations, which should be the meat and potatoes of any realistic (American) crime drama about such an occurrence.

Crime drama kinda falls flat, when those who write it know nothing about the law, to say the least.

But instead, this increasingly soapy operetta careens downward into the realm of pure fantasy, with no suggestion of this having been a federal crime, nor that this is supposed to have been therefore a story about a federal matter to investigate and prosecute, which rather (in the USA) stunningly relevant detail is thenceforth ignored entirely.

(Clue to you Brits reading this: in the USA, quite unlike in the UK, the term 'the government' means any of ten-thousand-odd different governments, depending on where you're standing, and Americans who watch TV shows know this.)

Inquiries which would have begun with the local US Park Rangers and soon delegated among local police, the California Highway Patrol, the relevant US Attorneys office in CA, the FBI, and the US Marshalls Service, somehow end up being left entirely in the hands of the NYPD homicide division for no reality-grounded reason whatsoever. The case/story is thereupon passed off as some kind of New York's Finest police procedural, when in reality all the NYPD would ever have been asked to do is help the FBI and the Marshalls round up a few persons of interest for inquiry and/or extradition, and then go on about their business, of enforcing New York City and State laws, which this particular crime has no bearing on at all.

If any State/local law enforcement or prosecutors would have wanted in on such a case to investigate on any additional charges, these would have been California agencies, not New York's, as the Sixth Amendment requires: 'in the district wherein the crime shall have been committed.'

The lack of any (even implicit) involvement of the British Foreign Office or the New York British consulate further strains credulity, as it is their specific task to step in and at least oversee legal matters on foreign soil having to do with British subjects who have been accused of crimes while abroad bearing British passports.

Given all this, by the time an American defense attorney sitting in the wrong city talking to the wrong police force, making no mention whatsoever of his client's being a British subject or the crime having occurred on federal ground a continent away, then threatens the wrong detectives with their case being less than credible for the wrong district's DA to prosecute, with all the Americans in the room unable to restrain themselves from using British colloquialisms that Americans never use, the inescapably clueless development of the entire story, along both legal and cultural lines, has become almost farcical.

So by the end, when we find a British subject (having been prosecuted by and incarcerated in the wrong State under entirely inapplicable statutes by the wrong agencies and the wrong courts doing casework coming from outside their own jurisdictions by three thousand miles), being lectured about violence against women by a woman he never did any violence to, any reasonable expectation of suspension of disbelief from even the most forgiving (but even slightly legally and culturally literate) audience has long since been squandered.

Making the end itself, sadly enough, something of a relief at long last, as we have sat patiently watching this good concept and good start of a good story sabotaging itself, step by misstep, into outright silliness, out of pure ill-prepared semi-literate ignorance, for the past six hours.

The purely fantasist and nakedly ideological escapades of the last ten minutes have, by then, at least become the predictable outcome, which is what everyone wants from yet another entry in an unending parade of violence-against-women crime dramas, right?