Yes it’s another British crime drama, but it’s not your usual suspect

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Yes it’s another British crime drama, but it’s not your usual suspect

By Craig Mathieson

The Jetty ★★★½
BritBox

At first glance, this British crime drama has a familiar feel: the opening theme is an anodyne electronic pop song; the action takes place along a foreboding body of water (a lake in Lancashire); and a building is burning in the first scene. But while the flames pass, the fire persists in Detective Constable Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman). A lifelong local possessed of dry retorts and a “no backward steps taken” attitude, Manning is a telling protagonist for a show that undercuts expectations.

It’s easy to gender-flip archetypes. The female antihero police detective can be as obsessive and flawed as any man, but The Jetty’s creator, Cat Jones, makes Manning’s gender crucial to her life and work. The character is acutely aware of power imbalances, and even as she’s officially investigating the arson attack on the boat club, she’s also unofficially querying whether a pregnant 16-year-old, Miranda Ashby (Shannon Watson), was having sex as an underage girl with older local men.

Jenna Coleman and Archie Renaux in The Jetty.

Jenna Coleman and Archie Renaux in The Jetty.Credit: Ben Blackall / BBC Studios / Firebird Pictures

The possible exploitation of teenage girls riles Manning. It feels like the ugly flipside to misogynistic attitudes that persist. A high school principal discounts problems with a group of male students as being due to “hormones”, while Manning’s junior partner, Simon Hitchson (Archie Renaux), is more bemused than alarmed. But Manning also can’t deny her own past: she had her daughter, 15-year-old Hannah (Ruby Stokes), at the age of 17, and her late husband, a year gone due to testicular cancer, was also older.

When Riz Samuel (Weruche Opia), a podcaster who covers crimes against women, comes to town, the long-dormant case of a missing local girl feeds into the plot, with the story of Amy Knightly (Bo Bragason) unfolding in flashback as shortcomings in the cold case worry Manning. Samuel’s arch audio links are heard as narration, and they’re indicative of Jones’ approach. At first, Samuel sounds like a performer, but there’s a grim truth to her ripe sentences. Steadily, against her own wishes, Manning comes to a similar realisation.

Jenna Coleman stars as a cop in a Northern English town in The Jetty.

Jenna Coleman stars as a cop in a Northern English town in The Jetty.Credit: Ben Blackall/BBC Studios/Firebird Pictures

With just four episodes, The Jetty has a torrid, jangled pace. The more Manning pursues the interlaced cases, the more she risks herself. Jenna Coleman, masterful in The Cry, is first-rate here, as Manning is forced to reassess her own decisions and her husband’s legacy. Manning’s scenes with her wayward mother Sylvia (Amelia Bullmore) are notably sharp-edged. The show is ambitious and sometimes too keen on proclamations, but the uncomfortable realities make their mark. “Do you think truth and justice are always the same thing,” Manning is asked. She has no easy answer.

Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist ★★½
Binge

Sometimes an excess of period detail can be a crutch a show doesn’t need. With its Blaxploitation nods and 1970s signifiers – big afros, pimp fits, vintage rides and funk tunes – this slyly comic crime thriller spends too long making itself comfortably familiar to the audience. With Kevin Hart as a bit player aiming for underworld glory who is double-crossed, Fight Night should have momentum to spare. But the excess production design can feel like a drag.

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The setting is Atlanta in 1970, a southern city with an African-American majority. The powerbrokers are new, but the dynamics are traditional. When Muhammad Ali (Dexter Darden) announces a comeback fight in the city, Black crime boss Frank Moten (Samuel L. Jackson) flies in. Local hustler Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Kevin Hart) sees his chance. He throws the visiting gang bosses an after-party, but when armed robbers strike, the powerful victims decide that Gordon set them up.

A slyly comic crime thriller: Samuel L. Jackson and Terrence Howard in Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist.

A slyly comic crime thriller: Samuel L. Jackson and Terrence Howard in Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist. Credit: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK

Created by Shaye Ogbonna (The Chi), and very loosely inspired by real events, this limited series is on cruise control. You can at least understand why it’s happy to showcase a stacked cast that also features Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard and Don Cheadle, playing the first Black police officer of detective rank and a doubtful bodyguard to Ali. There are historical undercurrents and personal desires, but Fight Night is mostly content to please.

Terminator Zero
Netflix

Set in 1997 Tokyo and delivered with vivid anime designs, this Japanese-American animated series offers a different perspective on a familiar franchise as the creator of an AI program and his family have to go on the run while pursued by a cyborg assassin and a mysterious soldier claiming to be from the future. The English dubbing provides a slew of familiar voices – Andre Holland, Timothy Olyphant and Rosario Dawson all feature – and imagery that gushes the deepest red of spilt blood. The ultimate winner is the dominant Terminator intellectual property.

OceanXplorers
Disney+

Meanwhile, James Cameron, who wrote and directed The Terminator back in 1984, takes a working holiday from his many Avatar sequels to produce and narrate this amenable National Geographic documentary series dedicated to one of his great passions: deep-sea exploration. Working from the titular ship and its high-tech submersible, the six episodes circumnavigate the planet’s water. The scientists and engineers attach a camera to a sperm whale in the North Atlantic, for example, to get ocean floor data, and Cameron does his best not to sound disappointed at not being hands-on.

Gary Oldman as shabby spymaster Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses.

Gary Oldman as shabby spymaster Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses.Credit: Apple TV+

Slow Horses (Season 4)
Apple TV+

I wolfed down the new episodes of this twisty and delightfully sardonic espionage drama about the MI5 outcasts who find themselves involved in covert crises. Most shows in their fourth season are on a comfortable autopilot, but Will Smith’s adaptations of Mick Herron’s spy novels are getting leaner, looser and notably bittersweet. Gary Oldman’s shabby spymaster Jackson Lamb remains the most inappropriate of bosses, but the bonds between most of his misfit crew have genuine depth. A nice bonus: as the American villain, Hugo Weaving’s accent has unnerving echoes of his Matrix character.

The Killer
Netflix

So this is not David Fincher’s terrific contract killer thriller from last year, but it is director John Woo’s remake of his own wildly influential 1989 Hong Kong action epic of the same name. Transposed to Paris, the plot remains familiar. A deadpan assassin, Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel), accidentally blinds a singer during a nightclub hit, leaving her both remorseful and the target of a hard-charging police inspector, Sey (Omar Sy). Woo’s aesthetic hasn’t significantly changed in 35 years, as balletic shootouts and existential gangster silhouettes alternate, but this can’t be anything more than an auteur’s homage to himself.

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