Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin star in a thin, thin Amazon thriller. It’s horrifically badly paced, deeply repetitive and tension free – not to mention its deeply unlikely plot
ame Edna Everage (and if you are too young to know of the housewife superstar that was Barry Humphries’ greatest creation, get yourselves to YouTube and gaze upon her glory, possums) once begged South Bank Show presenter and prolific novelist Melvyn Bragg to stop writing: “Give us all a chance to catch up.”
I feel the same way about Harlan Coben’s TV career. With the possible revision that once we have caught up, if he doesn’t feel refreshed enough to give us something better than Lazarus, he could extend his hiatus until full reinvigoration has been achieved.
Coben, an established writer of mystery novels and thrillers, including the dependable Myron Bolitar series, signed a five-year, 14-book adaptation deal with Netflix in 2018. This was extended for a further four years in 2022, bringing the Bolitar books under its aegis. We are 10 adaptations into that. They usually star Richard Armitage and other solid actors doing their best with scripts that appear to have been stripped of Coben’s storytelling prowess and, if not actually typed by a roomful of a monkeys, then definitely patched together by them.
