BBC's "Hot" New Cliche Wrought Spy Thriller - The Hunted

Since the worst excesses of the James Bond era -  where over the top gadgets, ridiculously oversexualised names and an abundance of one liners, it feels as if the spy genre has been trying relentlessly to purge itself of anything like that... unfortunately, the pendulum has really swung too far the other way and has created a tiresome sea of similarity, into which the BBC has now hurled another wretched offering - The Hunted.

From pretty much the first moment of the show, you're going to notice the washed out colours and you should get used to it because it's constant. As is the cutting of the camera, the director and or editor are seemingly unable to allow a shot to last for more than three seconds at the best of times and as soon anything remotely interesting happens (don't worry, these moments are few and far between) the cuts start to become so rapid they mean you've little idea of what's going on. With one notable exception, where we see a gratuitous shot of someone having a syringe stabbed in their eye... but this is from the people that made Spooks, a show most people will remember for having a rather graphic death by deep fat fryer, so presumably this is attempting to ape that.

Washed out colours and ham fisted directing and editing aside, the story has our main character get shot TWICE in the first twenty minutes and yet, at no point is anything other than dull. A first episode really needs to grab you and yet, this was as dull as dishwater. The camerawork is so terrible that the action scenes - far from being exciting breaks from the awful dialogue are more likely to induce an epileptic seizure than actual tension.

And the dialogue really is poor. Another spy thriller cliche box ticked with the terse dialogue by various tight lipped characters... and it might be acceptable if it was just used occasionally to highlight stress and the rest of the time they talked like ACTUAL humans but these characters can't help but talk in soundbites and cliches.

There's no chance this can be a slow burner either, it's an eight parter... one doesn't really have time to burn anything but quickly when one is limited to eight one hour episodes... Really, there's just nothing to say about this show other than "don't bother". It has been done better in every conceivable way by others, so... there's no point in wasting time on this.