I wonder how Anthony Hopkins feels about being a serial killer, not just for a time but, the way things are shaping up, forever. It's been 31 years since he gave us his Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, since he sucked his teeth and looked through the lens right into our livers and spoke with the light, the Larry Hagman accent that made everything we I would say it was 300 times scarier. . He is still the only one and it is difficult to get out from under the shadow of him in boiler suit.
In Steven Moffat's new drama Inside Man (BBC One), Stanley Tucci is loaded with many parallels to the great man/horrible character. He plays Jefferson Grieff, a very intelligent and soft-spoken prisoner, on death row for murdering his wife. People come to him for information on his stalled cases and he enjoys playing with them until he deigns to provide his restless visitors with solutions to his problems. The latter are deduced in a way that can only be described with reference to another great man/horrible character, Sherlock Holmes, who was resurrected by Moffat himself in a way that will likely prove just as difficult for future generations to overcome. Tucci works hard to make him his own man, but the real innovation lies elsewhere.
Stars: David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells
Grieff's story at first unfolds alongside a seemingly unrelated narrative set in an English village, around sweet vicar Harry (David Tennant) and a fundamentally unsweet maths tutor, Janice (Dolly Wells). We meet her firing a drunken young man (that unmistakable mix of creepy and aggressive captured perfectly by Harry Cadby) who is bullying young journalist Beth Davenport (Lydia West) and other women in a subway car. This core of steel, and possibly this journalist, will soon make life very difficult for Harry.
Troubled young sacristan Edgar (Mark Quartley) gives Vicar Harry a flash drive that turns out to contain images of child sexual abuse. An unfortunate chain of events means that Janice sees it and believes that she belongs to Harry's son, Ben (Louis Oliver). He is an incredibly unrewarding teenager, but Harry loves him and tries to convince Janice that she is wrong, without betraying Edgar. This is a weak point in the story. I suspect that many people shouted, like me, at the television: "Betray the pedophile!" But we all understand how fiction works, so a little more effort is applied to suspend disbelief and we move on.
A fight ensues between Harry and Janice and she ends up unconscious in the basement. Harry closes the door behind him. And the show turns into a twisted interrogation of Grieff's claim that we're all killers, we just haven't met the right person yet.
When Beth visits the prison to interview Grieff for an article and later asks for his advice about the missing Janice, she begins the interweaving of the stories. Only the first two of the four episodes were provided for review, but the mystery will clearly deepen.
Inside Man is typical Moffat food. Breaking confident, meaty, funny, smart (if not as smart, line for line, as it seems). Wells, cast here after her breakout role in Moffat's latest project, the glorious Dracula, and hopefully now a permanent member of her management company, is brilliant as Janice. The unspeakable weirdness and relentless moral authority she brings to the trapped woman give the whole thing an anything-could-happen air that brings you anxiously to the edge of your seat, even if nothing really terrible has happened. Tennant is in a non-frantic, non-cranky mode, which is a relief. Tucci sells his part of the script well, a little cocky and a little portentous, and provides himself with some nice comic relief in the form of his partner, Dillon (Atkins Estimond), a serial killer ("I went to a therapist, I really loved him!") I opened up! Left the profession”) from the next cell. Think Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Doug Judy with a killer twist. If you're not a fan of Moffat, watch it for Dillon only. If you don't get sucked into the rest of the romp , I would be surprised, but I would like to think that you at least had this joy.
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