The End Of Dire Spy Schlock Hunted

And so, Hunted ends not with a bang but a "wow, that's eight hours wasted." You can't blame the hacks that wrote this drivel though - actually, you can and should - they did their best (which would have to work hard and buck up its ideas to aspire to be mediocre)  in this last episode to make this try and seem like it was all terribly clever.

The attempt to make Hunted look like some intelligent interweaving story is truly laughable as an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach would be underselling the desperation apparent here. The gangsta's son (Steve) wife didn't commit suicide - SHE WAS MURDERED! But wait! THERE'S MORE! She was murdered BY HIS HALF-BROTHER! Tyrone - the nefarious black guy that worked for Dave. At his father's behest, of course.

Still not sold on how clever this is?! What if they explain why gangsta dad is hellbent on getting this dam? Because his son (the one that got murdered) was murdered by Polyhedrous - one of the evil multi-national corporations - twenty years ago and he wants his revenge! Except that his plan is upset by the fact the blackmail material he had on Polyhedrous (who killed over six hundred people) is fake!

Luckily for our heroine, being drugged and then drowned isn't a serious setback to her, so she activates her Jesus powers to resurrect herself and murder gangsta dad - just in time for her boyfriend(ish) to come in and inject her with the antidote because obviously for her to shake off drowning AND poison THAT would break the suspension of disbelief! Oh and being drowned let her remember the pivotal(?) event from her childhood that links in to the whole Hourglass thing. Handy that!

Oh and Sam gets shot. Again but shockingly - DOESN'T DIE! AND SHE GETS HANDED A BABY! What a twist?

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.