In Keira Knightley’s best roles, there’s always a certain itchiness to her performance. It gives the characters she plays, no matter how confident seeming on the surface, the suggestion of a dose of imposter syndrome. It’s a quality that makes her a natural for an espionage agent who may have gone a bit emotionally soft but remains quite good at acts of physical brutality. Thus, she’s a perfect fit as Helen Webb, one of the titular Black Doves of the new Netflix series.
Having taken an undercover job years earlier, Helen has fully committed to the bit. She’s married her target, British Secretary of State for Defence Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), and they’ve had two kids. She still sends along information to her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire, wonderfully ice-cold), but things have slowed down considerably. Perhaps that boredom—or the fact that she married for espionage, not love—led to her affair with Jason (Andrew Koji), a civil servant whose assassination reveals a much larger conspiracy involving the CIA, a Chinese diplomat, and an assortment of underworld figures. Things get nasty and complicated so quickly that Reed has no choice but to bring in Sam (Ben Whishaw), a trigger man and friend of Helen’s living in self-imposed exile abroad.
If Knightley’s performance plays to her familiar—if too often underestimated skills—Whishaw’s initially dead-eye turn as an assassin reveals no skills in the actor’s toolbox. Even as he warms in the presence of his spy friend Helen and an assortment of old “civilian” buddies and romances, there’s a hollowness to him. Later revelations shed light on the why of it—revelations that the show might’ve been better to skip—but Whishaw repeatedly emphasizes something in the hitman has dried up and blown away.
He’s also the first hint that the show has a darkly humorous and anarchic side. If Slow Horses is a spy series with a dry comedy streak, Black Doves feels increasingly like a black comedy series where spy stuff happens. The violence is frequently over the top, so much so that one must either embrace its silliness or turn the whole thing off. Knightley and Whishaw have wonderful “old friends who love to give each other the business” energy. Even funnier are two women assassins (Gabrielle Creevy and Ella Lily Hyland) the duo can’t seem to shake. The pair are fatalistic but strangely comfortable with their limited chances of survival. Greevy is especially a kick, an odd duck who seems utterly disconnected from her bloody business.
In some ways, Black Doves feels a bit like John Wick filtered through British sensibilities. Wick is certainly a deeper and more thoroughly constructed alternate reality. Nonetheless, they have similar vibes. Both share that otherworldly quality where public violence is ubiquitous but almost ignored by most citizens. Shadowy organizations control the world’s destiny while somehow not making the world look or feel significantly different than our own. It demands a deep swallow of the pill of suspended disbelief but if you can get on that level, there’s fun to be had.
All the talk of black humor and wild shenanigans might lead one to believe the whole show is a lark. That would be a mistaken impression. The only thing Black Doves is more doggedly committed to than delivering blood and snark is portraying the various states of feel-bad Knightley and Whishaw dwell in. Of the two, Whishaw’s tale of woe proves more compelling if for no other reason than it is the most straight ahead. Before his exile, the trigger man got comfortable and started to build a life with Michael (Omari Douglas).
That overconfidence endangered both their lives, forcing Sam to come clean about his occupation and disappear. Meanwhile, Michael attempted to move on with his life, starting a family. Unfortunately, he could not fully trust or commit to his new partner, and the relationship dissolved. Douglas brings an understandable befuddlement and frustration to the role, ensuring Michael feels like a romantic but never a pushover.
Helen’s romantic woes, by contrast, feel underbaked. Part of that is the show never fleshes out Jason, her secret lover. Black Doves doesn’t even give him the “perfect guy” edit. The brief flashbacks don’t give him a personality so much as confirm he had nice lips. Presumably, Helen found more worthwhile about him, but the series doesn’t particularly care to show or tell us what. So, while it is easy to see why she—a woman in a marriage that is a literal job for her—might long for something more emotionally satisfying, the audience never sees why that is Jason. Maybe that’s the point. Helen is so hungry for something more she’ll jump at anything. Sadly, if it is, the scripts don’t do much to confirm that hypothesis.
That said, Knightley does longing well. She does it so well, in fact, she sells using his discarded vape as an act of both lust and grief. Still, beyond her saying, repeatedly, she loved him there’s not much on the screen to prove it. Again, there’s too little of Jason to tell viewers anything, an odd oversight considering what an important part he plays in the show’s larger conspiracy narrative.
So it is not a perfect work. Or near to, really. Despite comparisons to John Wick and Slow Horses above, it is in neither of their leagues. But it is, paradoxically, a mopey, blood-splattered bit of fun anchored by two strong lead performances.
Black Doves runs and guns on Netflix now.