Posted in: Netflix, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: black doves, opinion
Black Doves Suffers From Too Many Dumb Bits Outweighing What Works
Netflix's Keira Knightley & Ben Whishaw-starring Black Doves has an intriguing premise but gets bogged down by a lot of nonsensical plotting.
Black Doves is the latest spy thriller in a season where spy thrillers are practically tumbling out of the closet. The best of them, Slow Horses from Mick Herron's books, have been chugging along for several seasons now, but we just also had Taylor Sheridan's second season of Lioness, the updated reboot of The Day of the Jackal, and the US remake of The Bureau from a hit French series from the 2010s. Black Doves has to set itself apart with a decent high concept and central stars Keira Knightley in her first action star role and Ben Whishaw, who can do no wrong in any role he plays. It was created by and written by Joe Barton, who had previously written the Japanese-British crime thriller Giri/Hari, so there was cause to hope for something good. Unfortunately, there are so many dumb and implausible moments in the new series that it strains belief, coming off as if the writer knows nothing about 1) how guns work, 2) how spies work, 3) how international politics work, 4) how crime works or 5) how deadly global conspiracies work.
The Good Parts of Black Doves
Let's start with the parts of Black Doves that work. Keira Knightley plays the picture-perfect supportive wife of the British Minister of Defence who sets out to find out who murdered her lover and finds a conspiracy that threatens her deep cover as a spy keeping tabs on the government while her boss enlists her best friend, a hitman played by Ben Whishaw, to help her and keep her alive. So far, so good, right? There's dark, funny, snarky dialogue, and Knightley and Whishaw are convincing as ride-or-die best friends. Whishaw's character is a fun twist on the "gay best friend" trope by being a hitman. The two amoral hitwomen they tangle with, then ultimately team up with, are also fun and believable. Whishaw's character juggling his job and trying to settle down with the man he falls in love with feels like the most authentic and true part of the story, even if it feels like the usual trope of a main character whose job puts his lover at risk. Whishaw's ties with the Underworld also feel lived-in and have a whiff of authentic London quirkiness. If this series had stuck with being a crime story instead of a spy story, it would be one of the best and most fun, darkly comic British crime shows of 2024. Unfortunately, Black Doves just has to be a spy story, and it ends up indulging in all kinds of dumb and implausible bullshit.
Now… The Bad Parts of Black Doves
What nearly drowns out the good parts of Black Doves is a mind-boggling series of choices the writing takes that make it dumber and dumber and less believable as it goes along. Warning: there will be spoilers ahead.
A Total Misrepresentation of Chinese Characters
The Chinese characters in Black Doves can't even be called racist stereotypes because the writing gets their behaviour completely wrong. None of the Chinese characters, from the murdered ambassador to his missing junkie daughter to the supposed-t0-be-threatening government officials, talk or act like what they're like. This suggests zero research into at least some semblance of reality. The Chinese ambassador and his daughter speak and act like British people. A Chinese ambassador wouldn't bother to confront his daughter's dirtbag English boyfriend directly. He would just ship her on the first plane home immediately without giving a damn what she thinks and have his bodyguards beat the boyfriend up.
A Dumb Comic Book Take on Politics
One of the plot threads that drives Black Doves is the Chinese government's belief that the CIA murdered the Chinese ambassador and the British government is helping the Americans cover it up and threatening nuclear war. This is the biggest misunderstanding of global politics. The Chinese government would never threaten nuclear war over the death of their ambassador. They would do tit-for-tat.
Knowing Nothing About How Spies Work
Okay, everyone likes to think of spy thrillers as James Bond movies full of derring-do and explosive action. That's a comic book fantasy, which is fair enough, but James Bond movies and the more grounded Slow Horses make sense in ways Black Doves doesn't. This series is full of plot holes where the actions of Knightley, Whishaw, the hitwomen, and virtually everyone who shows up would draw the police all over the place. The writing completely forgets that London has surveillance cameras on every street, so there's no way any of the big shootouts and exploding houses they jump out of wouldn't have drawn the attention of the authorities for days. The climax has a bunch of Chinese and American spies get into a major shootout on the streets of Central London. Spies never get into a Michael Mann-style shootout in a city. Criminals and cops do. And no spies, cops, or criminals in a shootout would stand out in the open, so they all shoot each other in the head, so they all conveniently die for the sake of plot.
Keira Knightley works for a top-secret private spy organisation that takes money from the highest bidder and spies and works for governments and criminal organizations, and if an agent exposes themselves, they'll be executed. Yet the organisation has random men in HR departments in random offices doing the recruiting for them. It's pretty obvious that every government and crime family knows this organisation exists!! How does this make any sense at all?!
Plot Holes and Action Movie Tropes That Make No Sense
Black Doves wants to have big, loud, explosive action movie moments, but the way they happen makes no sense. Why would two hitwomen posing as cops show up to search their victim's apartment and need to kill the landlady when that would only turn his original murder into an even more high-profile case? The reason is so they can fight Keira Knightley and for Ben Whishaw to show up and blow one of their heads off. Whishaw and the hitwoman keep showing up in places and immediately get into big, loud shootouts for no real reason. Why would a hitman who leaves no evidence in his apartment need to rig it to explode – and blow up half his apartment building? How do any of the characters in this story walk twenty feet without getting arrested?
And everyone shoots people in the head in the shootouts like in the John Wick movies. Headshots are cool but extremely difficult to pull off on a target more than twelve inches away, point blank, and no person stays still long enough. Only snipers are trained to achieve headshots. Standard firearms training is to aim at centre mass because that's the biggest part of a human target to hit and stop an enemy. This is how I know the writer doesn't know a thing about gun use. Screenwriters who don't know guns only became preoccupied with headshots this century due to the emergence of two things: the rise of zombie stories where that's the only way to kill them, and the rise of shooter video games where headshots are favored as a sign of player skill, particularly in Resident Evil games. We live in a world where every screenwriter under the age of sixty has played video games, but very few of them have done research into real guns or training.
A Completely Unbelievable Global Conspiracy
When the Big Bad is a secret global criminal organisation that everyone is terrified of – HOW? THEY'RE SO SECRET NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT THEM! – that's described as a "Mossad meets The Krays" that began as a British crime family, and the head of that family is played by… surprise guest star TRACY ULLMAN??!!!. How do you expect even the most brain-dead person to buy any of that?
That's not to say Tracy Ullman can't play someone evil, but the script doesn't lay any real groundwork or context to make her a feared and deadly Bond villain. She barely comes off as a convincing mob boss here, more a pissed-off high-maintenance administrator. The passive-aggressive and grotesque hypochondriac she played in Curb Your Enthusiasm, who worms her way into Larry David's home and bed, is far more evil and terrifying. Black Doves doesn't seem to know how to write someone truly evil or a menacing, evil conspiracy that encompasses the world – all they do is show up in cars to shoot people, which is just generic crime shit. And by the end, Knightley and Whishaw have killed Ullman and presumably made themselves targets of the organisation, which has hundreds of henchmen everywhere, so why don't they just send killers to murder them immediately?
The Difference Between Plausible Fantasy and Just Making Stuff Up
You could argue that Black Doves is just a silly pulp fantasy and run with it. It's certainly watchable and highly entertaining, but believable? No. Genre fiction depends on a certain amount of made-up stuff but it has to feel like it's plausible. Black Doves doesn't seem to know what's plausible and what's not and tries to cruise by on its star power – Knightley, Whishaw, and the cast are charismatic and endlessly watchable – but at some point, that's not enough when the mountain of sheer nonsense threatens to drown it all. That said, would I still watch season two of Black Doves? Absolutely. Knightley and Whishaw, as a deadly woman and her equally deadly gay best friend, are an irresistible duo at the heart of the story. Now, if the scripts were believable on top of their hilarious dialogue, the show would be perfect.
Black Doves is streaming on Netflix.