Black Doves — Review (Netflix)

BLACK DOVES — REVIEW (ON NETFLIX)

There’s a lot to love about Black Doves, the latest popular series now available on Netflix. There’s also considerable chaos and confusion. To enjoy, we must suspend all sense of reality. This sort of thing could never happen in real life. Think of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels crossed with The Gentlemen melded with Kingsmen and frosted with Zero Dark Thirty. Rarely does a spy-caper provide so much style. Death monologues become poetry. Killing is art.

I loved most of it. I hated parts of it.

Black Doves is a six-part mini-series. Each episode runs about an hour. It is, at different times, sometimes within seconds of each other — brilliant, beautiful, emotionally moving, funny, and fantastic. Many moments are just as disjoined, gratuitously unnecessary (both in terms of violence and sex), and even occasionally dull.

Kiera Knightly plays the wife of the British Defense Secretary and a mother of two. Think of a badass Kate Middleton who’s bored being a Tory. Her secret life is working as a martial-arts expert and mercenary, a laughably unqualified killer-for-hire who has no apparent allegiances to anyone or anything other than her own desperate longing for adventure and excitement. If this sounds preposterous–well, it is preposterous. But if we suspend what’s real versus what isn’t and accept her as a sort of beautiful model-esque James Bond, it all surprisingly works thanks to witty crack dialogue, near-perfect cinematography, and a constant music soundtrack that blows the viewer away, as though we’re sometimes watching the best MTV videos in the 1980s.

Consider just one scene where country-music American icon Johnny Cash (in a real recording) is mouthing the words to a classic Christmas song while a bullet is piercing the skull and blasting out the brains of a poor, but deserving scumbag victim. It’s a masterpiece. Dr. Werner Spitz, the father of blood spatter theory, would be working loads of overtime if he were assigned to these cases. Guy Richie and Quentin Tarantino have been icons at this sort of thing for a while now and we’ve seen it all before. But still, Black Doves provides a new and entertainingly dark twist on violence, punctuated by quirky characters who are laughably ridiculous and terrifying all at once. Of course, the evil bad guys — with their impossible-to-follow-or understand-while-mangling-every-other-word working-class dripping-thick accents from the gutter bowels of the UK — steal every fucking scene.

Kiera Knightly stars. However, Ben Whishaw is the standout performance in Black Doves. He plays Knightly’s partner and closest confidant. Whishaw, who has a stellar body of work, plays an openly-gay British assassin who is burdened with deeper internal conflicts, both moral and personal. This is one of the best portrayals of any killer-for-hire since Max Von Sydow in Three Days of the Condor. Whishaw’s vulnerabilities, yet unequalled precision at murdering those under contract are award-worthy. He’s fantastic.

Black Doves doesn’t trumpet any sermons openly, but there’s also an ominous cautionary tale to much of the murder and mayhem throughout the series. We never quite know who is “giving the orders.” We’re told the killing unit will go to any extreme, no matter how bloody and violent, to the “highest bidder.” No flags. No governments. No politics. It’s just business. That’s a very scary prospect, but one which may become (or has become) a reality in a new age of global oligarchs, massive criminal enterprises, monoliths, and mega-billionaires who really — not so secretly anymore — run the world.

Side Note: Out of six episodes, #2 and #6 are exceptional television. This is a good a program(s) as I’ve watched this past year. The other episodes are not nearly as good. Be warned that this series (#1) starts slow. I almost gave up on it at one point early in the series, but I’m glad I stuck with it. The payoff is worth the misgivings. You won’t find many movies or television series with as much intrigue as this one. Even with it’s many flaws,

Black Dove rates as nearly-great. If you’re a fan of British gangster films (I am) and eccentric characters, this is one of the best Netflix series of 2024.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10