First, bias disclosed - Furst is not my favorite writer. He's one of those who spends enormous amounts of time on the mise-en-scene, if you will, at the expense of narrative flow. That makes me a skeptic to begin with. If you love Furst, don't waste your time with my review. I obviously don't.
More to the point, the casting is all wrong. One of the things that makes some current European shows so engaging is that the actors look like real people, not plastic Barbie and Kens. Not here - casting was aligned with the character's role in the script. Bad guys look like bad guys. Good guys look like....stick figures. Some of the secondary characters are tolerable but David Tennant is totally miscast. To call it acting elevates his action several levels above its pay grade. I'm not sure I saw a single expression change over the two installments I was able to sit through.
More to the point, he's totally unprepossession physically, so there' not even that element to offset the one-dimensional performance. He looks like the before panel in one of those old Charles Atlas ads we of a certain age used to see at the back of comic books. The image from the rear of him walking down a darkened street is almost laughable; he looks like a scarecrow in motion.
The plot is totally predictable, down to the female League of Nations lawyer and the treacherous head of delegation who is constantly thwarting Tennant. Other stock characters include the Russian-Jewish couple who are recalled during Stalin's later purges, the German engineer who is selling secrets to subsidize his affair with a French spy and the loyal sidekicks from the Polish intelligence service. You could have sketched them out with stick figures on a cocktail napkin and used that as a script, that's show simple minded they are.
No, I'm usually not this negative, but in this case, the plot is nonsense, the characters are unbelievable and the casting is atrocious. But, the popcorn was pretty good!
More to the point, the casting is all wrong. One of the things that makes some current European shows so engaging is that the actors look like real people, not plastic Barbie and Kens. Not here - casting was aligned with the character's role in the script. Bad guys look like bad guys. Good guys look like....stick figures. Some of the secondary characters are tolerable but David Tennant is totally miscast. To call it acting elevates his action several levels above its pay grade. I'm not sure I saw a single expression change over the two installments I was able to sit through.
More to the point, he's totally unprepossession physically, so there' not even that element to offset the one-dimensional performance. He looks like the before panel in one of those old Charles Atlas ads we of a certain age used to see at the back of comic books. The image from the rear of him walking down a darkened street is almost laughable; he looks like a scarecrow in motion.
The plot is totally predictable, down to the female League of Nations lawyer and the treacherous head of delegation who is constantly thwarting Tennant. Other stock characters include the Russian-Jewish couple who are recalled during Stalin's later purges, the German engineer who is selling secrets to subsidize his affair with a French spy and the loyal sidekicks from the Polish intelligence service. You could have sketched them out with stick figures on a cocktail napkin and used that as a script, that's show simple minded they are.
No, I'm usually not this negative, but in this case, the plot is nonsense, the characters are unbelievable and the casting is atrocious. But, the popcorn was pretty good!