Line of Duty

Bearing in mind the BBC’s possibilities, this is “just" regular filmmaking craft, but an outstanding genre movie at the same time. In regular crime series, internal affairs/units uncovering corruption are often presented as hotbeds of corruption themselves or bureaucratic getting in the way of honest cops. But not here. It’s not just about trying to catch out a corrupt cop, but trying to catch a cop who knows the loopholes of the system inside out and he bends it to suit himself, to get to the best cases that would take him to the top, trampling over everybody else who is in the way. They don’t want necessarily to destroy him, just to clip his wings a little, but... But that doesn’t work if they have someone Lennie James standing against them (the first impression that he was just a second-rate alternative “because Idris Elba was busy" is immediately proven wrong), because excels in the role of a man who has to lead a team, solve cases, deal with his own personal, unenviable crisis and still keep one step ahead of internal affairs. His “Lutheran multi-tasking" parts that are what’s best about this series. The problem is that he is only given the same amount of space as a disillusioned new guy who wants to catch him out and an ambitious female undercover detective who operates in his team. And not that these two storylines were bad, they just aren’t as good. Too bad about the obvious final twist in the ambulance, but if nothing else, at least it gives some interesting options for season two. Also the initial deus ex machina with the accident is taking things a little too far, but otherwise it is a nice, down-to-earth and even the actions and the behavior of the characters was, (not just) for this genre, convincing. It’s refreshing to see that season two doesn’t simply regurgitate season one slightly differently and that it takes its own path where (despite the absence of the main powerhouse of season one) it loses none of its quality. What isn’t refreshing is that again we get deus ex machines where for incomprehensible reasons the authors felt the need to have all of the main protagonists somehow personally involved in the case. The City where this is set has a population exceeding ten million, but in this its like no more than ten live there. This rather takes away from the convincing down-to-earthness of season one, but even so, it has sufficient quality and suspense to make it more than just a regular crime series. Season three then completely breaks free from the chains of hitherto credibility, but the result is an incredibly high-octane and twist-full version of Internal Affairs which works (much better than anyone might expect) with the rather out-of-place seeming conspiring loose ends of the preceding seasons. I could criticize much about this, but, like it or not, I must admit that in some places I my knuckles turned white from tension (especially during the interrogation scenes), so it would be a bit hypocritical of me. In any case, for season four I personally would return to the original waters of everyday internal affairs unit routine. It really seemed for a long while that season four had taken a step back and that it turned into an affair full of twists where the burden of circumstances draws the characters into a spiral of wrong decisions. However, the final episode returns it to the “conspiracy" level. Not bad at all, but maybe a little unnecessary. It would have worked without that too. In any case, the tempo and suspense are right up there again, Thandie Newton and Lee Ingleby are brilliantly cast and so the greatest drawback is that this time there are notably fewer of the piece de resistance of this series, the interrogations. This time round there are only two interrogations that last the fundamental ten minutes. And that is unforgivable. | S1: 4/5 | S2: 4/5 | S3: 5/5 | S4: 4/5 | S5: 3/5 | (11.05.2013) (weniger) (mehr)