TrueHello
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Arianna Moses
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
Kinley
This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
morrataxco
I enjoyed the first two stories more in this four-story series. Unlike other reviewers, I didn't find the first story rushed. I thought the pacing was good. It was pretty obvious what had happened to Helen and Linda in the past, so it isn't exactly a big reveal. However, I didn't think that the flashbacks added much to the story - perhaps there were just too many of them and neither of the young actress resembled the older ones much. I liked that the resolution at the end included the historic case being reported, though.I'm not sure that there was much original in the first case - one police officer has to convince another that the wrong person has been charged etc - we've seen this many times before, but I liked the dynamic of having an established couple working together rather than a romantic tension cliche. I thought Ben Batt was really convincing as an excited prospective father, it was interesting that Helen Weeks isn't an entirely likeable character and I thought Matt King's character added quite a lot.You have to suspend belief a little in the second story - as if a woman about to give birth would rush around investigating a case. The character dynamic also completely changes. I must say, I really wasn't really that interested by the gang-member story and I didn't feel sorry enough for the new gang member's situation. Those parts felt like a distraction or padding.Some things didn't make sense - why does the criminal Frank take the action he does in light of the information he gives to Helen at the end? He may have made assumptions initially, but his henchman seems to get the full story but the course of action continues. Also, an item is stolen, we can eventually guess who by or, at least, who had arranged it, but why isn't it mentioned during the resolution? The ending was a little flat: you've kind of worked out some of it by then, I didn't buy the blackmail part and Helen's disgust didn't feel real enough. It was all over in five minutes with an off-camera confession.I felt a bit "cheated" by that!I thought Matt King was underused in the second story and the David Leon character was woefully underdeveloped. Still, I'd watch it were a second series made but it would be a different programme out of necessity.
jc-osms
I'm not familiar with the source book by Mark Billingham and so was initially confused by the format of this four-part crime drama consisting of two loosely connected stories run together one after the other.The first story was a traditional whodunnit in a familiar set-up where two young girls go missing, one turns up dead and there's a race to save the other one. Returning to her detested home town is pregnant police detective Helen Weeks played by Myanna Buring, ostensibly to comfort her childhood friend, whose husband is the prime suspect, but of course she can't resist some investigating of her own. Not only that, it turns out that her main reason for hating her upbringing was a childhood trauma she shared with her friend, which means some clichéd encounters with her phantom childhood self as she battles her demons, not to mention wider local prejudice, to crack the case. We've all seen these kind of stories spread out over 6-8 episodes so I suppose I should be grateful for the concision here but somehow it did feel a touch rushed although I'll confess I didn't guess the perpetrator.Did I mention that our girl was conflicted in her love life? Despite having an apparently happy relationship with "good bloke" fellow cop Paul, she has a fling with another cop, a Jamie Dornan lookalike, to the extent that she doesn't know who the father of her child is. This plays onto the third and fourth episodes where, now heavily pregnant, her life is turned upside down by an apparently tragic accident involving one of the men in her life which goes onto involve gang warfare in inner Manchester, with a mounting body-count which doesn't stop until the last scene. This story was much darker, more urban, more interesting I thought and contrasted with the more traditional story at the heart of episodes 1 and 2.I suppose the two differing stories show how different one case can be from the next but didn't exactly make for convincing continuity. Buring's lone-wolf activities, especially in the second half, take some swallowing as she puts herself and her almost-due child at great personal risk as she tangles with teenage gangs and criminal overlords in pursuit of the truth.Buring was okay in a sub-Anna Friel-type part but Ben Batt (a lookalike for pop singer Chris Martin) was better in the thankless task of the cuckolded boyfriend. There were some odd background characters you suspect there for PC reasons like Buring's gay dad and his boyfriend and her very camp forensics chum who isn't above following men into toilets. I did like the acting of the young black actor who played the new teenage father drawn into gangdom to provide for his girlfriend and child.For me though, on the whole, there were too many situations, too many characters and too many coincidences, plus I never really cared for Buring's character much from the start. But the detective parts were fine as was the depiction of inner city life and strife in Manchester making it a slightly above average crime drama of its type.
daveym-649-444962
This review concentrates on the first two episodes but the lack of quality can easily be directed to the second two episodes Dreadful Acting, implausible plot line and a lack of continuity that was, quite frankly, breathtaking.The flashbacks, the way people spoke to each other - a detective to her boss - blimey.As for the cars - different number plates from one scene to the next - people travelling in the back of the car had a window behind them when the camera was in the car (like an estate car) and yet there was no window on the outside as they got out of the car. Abandoning cars in the middle of the village and a supposedly heavily pregnant police officer, getting and involved with a case outside of her force, barking orders and getting into fightsComplete and utter rubbish
Tweekums
This four part BBC crime drama features two separate major crimes with certain threads running through the whole series. The first two episodes see pregnant Manchester detective DI Helen Weeks returning to her home town in Derbyshire when the husband of an old school friend is suspected of kidnapping and murdering and kidnapping a second. As she looks into the case, irritating the local police in the process, she starts to think the prime suspect may be innocent. She is also reminded of the disturbing events that led to her leaving the town. It also emerges that her partner, also a police officer, might not be the father of her child.The second story takes place some months later, when DI Weeks is almost ready to give birth. A young would be gang member shoots at a car as part of an initiation; the car goes off the road and demolishes a bus stop killing DI Weeks' partner. She doesn't just need to find out who did it, she also wants to find out what he was doing there; when his phone indicates that he's been calling an old-school local gangster she is concerned with what he was involved in. While she is investigating this somebody is killing the young gangsters.This series contained two intriguing stories; unfortunately they feel a little rushed; both could have done with being three-part stories. The first story seemed particularly rushed, although I admit this might be because I thought the whole series would be one story at that point. There are some fairly dark themes, including the revelation that Weeks was abused as a child and the fact that while the main case in each story is solved there are many details are left unresolved; perhaps these will be looked into if there is a second series or perhaps they just reflect the reality that some crimes go unpunished. The cast does a solid job; particularly MyAnna Buring in the lead role, she makes the character believable even when she is waddling round trying to solve the crime on the day her baby is due! Overall I'd recommend this to fans of the genre even if it isn't the best example to be aired recently.