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Sky’s Prisoner script feels more like a retirement project than prime-time TV
Why has such a quality cast been given a script so full of cliches and clangers?
Things rarely end well for prison transport officers on TV. I can’t think of how many I’ve seen killed off so that their high-value assets in the back of the bulletproof van on its side can clamber out and be freed by whichever balaclava’d horde on motorbikes needs them out of there.
Prisoner (Sky Atlantic), a workaday new thriller, does at least flip the script. Izuka Hoyle plays a prison transport officer called Amber Todd who returns to work from maternity leave and, shockingly, doesn’t immediately die. Instead, when her prison convoy is trapped in a tunnel and attacked, just like in Mission: Impossible, Todd handcuffs herself to the high-value asset and lethal assassin Tibor Stone (Tahar Rahim) so that he can’t escape, and they begin a very bloody Midnight Run without the jokes.
The goal is to get Stone to London for an Old Bailey trial at which he is going to turn witness on his former organised crime employers Pegasus. (An aside: anyone reading this who is considering starting a major organised crime group, you don’t need to give it a name at all. Especially not one from Greek myth. It sounds silly.) Naturally, Pegasus (see?) doesn’t want this to happen, and have therefore sent their second-best assassin, Nina Drâgus (Babylon Berlin’s Leonie Benesch), who was trained by Stone, to take out the turncoat. The student will thus become the master.
If that sounds like a bit of a cliché then Prisoner is a veritable cheese factory of sloppy seconds. Stone is a type-one diabetic always prone to falling into a coma, Todd has a young child and a husband, who she will do anything to get back to, baddies always seem to come with Eastern European accents and cutting-edge criminality must, by law, involve drones and 3D printing.
It seems bizarre to have assembled a cast of the quality of Rahim, Hoyle, Eddie Marsan and Sam Troughton, only to give them the sort of “let’s nail the b-----d/not on my watch” lines that a semi-retired plumber might put in to his debut action film screenplay.
That said, a half-decent cat-and-mouse has to work very hard not to grab you, and Prisoner is too well-built to fail completely. How are they going to get out of this hole this time is a question that has sustained many a worse pot-boiler than this, and if you start episode one, you’ll do well not to push on to episode six (and see if they nail the b-----d).
As for this viewer, the question that sustained me through episodes one to three, which strangely are much weaker than the second half, was what happened when they needed to go number two? Amber and Tibor are handcuffed together for the first three hours, it’s a pretty tense environment and good drama is about putting yourselves in the characters’ shoes. I couldn’t let it go.
I suspect fixating on the practicalities of a scenario – how come they don’t get stuck getting out of the car?; what do you do about shoelaces? – means the story itself is not entirely engrossing. Prisoner, it’s safe to say, never truly held me captive.
Prisoner is on Sky Atlantic at 9pm on Thursday, April 30, and available on Sky on demand and NOW
