Criminal Record season two review – Peter Capaldi is just devastating in this intense crime thriller | Television
‘It, ‘it. What’s goin’ on ‘ere, then? Criminal Record, is it? A second sequence, you say? Well, strike a light-weight, guv, cos right here it comes, nee-nawing by London’s perp-spattered streets with one other investigational pea-souper. In the thick of it, as soon as once more, is DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), baring his decrease tooth whereas glowing at us by the windscreen of his Skoda Malfeasance.
Not that Capaldi’s peerlessly unsettling presence is the Apple TV drama’s sole distinguishing function, thoughts. There is its depiction of London as a metropolis impervious to pure mild, with conversations, interrogations and “roughings-up” carried out in opposition to a backdrop of defective streetlights and flickering tower-block TV units. There is its portrayal of systemic corruption, with all the things from the CID’s dimpled glass doorways to the foreheads of its junior plods slick with an oily sheen of venality. And there are the questions it poses re the character of management, with DS June Lenker (the ever-excellent Cush Jumbo) plagued by notions of who is in cost, and who should be.
But at Criminal Record’s coronary heart – its scrunched-up, ossified coronary heart – is Capaldi: chin smushed into his chest; mouth ajar; eyes the colour of a bruise. This is Capaldi’s signature look – and fairly devastating it is, too.
“Blimey, this is a bit intense,” chances are you’ll end up gulping as Hegarty friends out of one more window with the painful absent-mindedness of a ferret with an undiagnosed UTI. A corrupt ferret. The full extent of whose corruption was solely uncovered on the finish of the final sequence. (For those that missed it; this discovered Hegarty manipulating an harmless man into confessing to homicide).
And so we start the second sequence of Paul Rutman’s drama understanding, or assuming we all know, precisely what he is able to. As certainly, does Lenker, who spent a lot of the first sequence weaving and slinking across the unblinking Met veteran. Is it potential that Hegarty has softened? Could the textual content message he sends Lenker after two years of radio silence (“coffee?”) imply an try to rebuild what was as soon as, at greatest, an uneasy alliance?
As if. But Lenker is susceptible. She is haunted by her failure to avoid wasting a teenage boy murdered by far-right extremists at a political rally. Guilt and idealism present an unhelpful mixture. Errors of judgment dream. Hegarty’s nostrils twitch. Scenting insecurity, he approaches his ex-colleague with a carrot that does not a lot dangle as swing like a wrecking ball.
“I heard you’d retired,” says Lenker, feigning nonchalance over a cup of exposition in London’s worst-lit cafe. “No,” you eat a peaty, oak-aged rumble from the shadows. “They moved me to intelligence.”
From this injudicious vantage level, Hegarty has been watching a far-right group led by one Cosmo Thompson (one other fiercely watchable flip from Dustin Demri-Burns), an athleisure-swathed charmer from the oi-oi-saveloy college of fascism. One of Thompson’s boot boys – a berk referred to as Billy Fielding – has escaped from jail. Hegarty desires mentioned berk to steer him to Thompson. Lenker, in the meantime, believes Fielding to be answerable for the homicide of the teenage boy.
“Help me run him down,” Hegarty rumbles.
“Do you want me to work for you?” Lenker splutters.
“Change of scene,” I replied.
“You make it sound like a mini-break.”
“No,” Hegarty hisses, his ferrety death-stare turned to 11. “It’s better than a mini-break.”
And it is. If, that is, your thought of a top quality getaway includes trying to foil a bomb plot whereas being chased by underpasses by gnashing yahoos in cagoules.
Criminal Record is not an enormously complicated affair. Instead, it provides comparatively easy and fantastically paced storytelling, its narrative twists rising like handkerchiefs from a sleeve. The present’s complexity lies in its characters. Here, everybody is in their very own world, professionally, emotionally and morally: fragile planets circling each other as their weaknesses contract and broaden.
Now that we all know to not belief both Hegarty or Lenker, the strain is, this time spherical, even higher. Suspense builds, continues to construct after which – flamin’ Nora – builds some extra. How lengthy, we marvel, earlier than the elastic twangs again?
