STRICTLY COME MURDERING (STAY CLOSE)

 

It may not be enough to call off the search parties but the first week of 2022 has already yielded what might well turn out to be the year's worst show.

Hang your heads in shame Netflix for giving us the "so bad, it's not even genius" 'Stay Close' - a spectacularly inept English police drama adapted from the 2012 novel by the US writer Harlan Coben.

Directed by Daniel O'Hara and Lindy Heyman and starring Cush Jumbo, James Nesbitt, Sarah Parish and Eddie Izzard, it features some of the worst writing you'll see this side of 'Holkyoaks'.

And the acting isn't that hot either.

It also boasts the most bonkers pair of assassins to appear on our screens for many a year.

Adapted by Danny Brocklehurst (who really ought to know better), Mick Ford, Charlotte Coben and Victoria Asare-Archer, the eight episode miniseries relocates the original story from Atlantic City to the seaside resort of Blackpool in the north of England.

Jumbo's Megan Pierce-Shaw is living a happy suburban life with her partner, Daniel Francis' Dave Shaw, their two daughters and a son.

Megan is due to marry her fiancé and all is looking rosy until she receives a mysterious card addressed to Cassie.

You see, Megan used to be a pole dancer by the name of Cassie who left a notorious Lancashire club called Vipers after being involved with Rod Hunt's violent owner Stewart Green.

Stewart subsequently went missing and was presumed dead.. or is he?

On top of that, James Nesbitt's DS Mike Broome and Jo Joyner's DS Erin Cartwright have been asked by their idiot boss Jack Shalloo's Brian Goldberg to probe the disappearance of a local youth, Conor Calland's Carlton Flynn.

To give you a sense of the kind of idiot Goldberg is, he writes everything up on a digital screen like an elementary school teacher and we later learn he aspires to be in the Magic Circle.

Think David Brent or Michael Scott in charge of a police department and you're definitely in the right ballpark.

Wannabe 'Minder' character, Ross Boatman's Del Flynn wants Broome and Cartwright to trace his lad Carlton who was drugged up at the time, telling them he knows something is fishy about his son's disappearance because he can feel it in his piss.

That sounds like a dodgy medical condition which he really ought to talk to the doctor about.

We later learn Carlton was trying to spike a girl's drink in... wait for it... Vipers before he disappeared.

And while Broome and Cartwright try to piece together what happened, a pair of ballroom dancing assassins (no, seriously) Hyoie O'Grady's Ken and Poppy Gilbert's Barbie are also on the hunt for Carlton and are bumping off anyone they come into contact with.

The police investigation sees Broome cross paths with Sarah Parish's Vipers nightclub hostess Lorraine Griggs and another blast from the past, Eddie Izzard's down at heel lawyer Harry Sutton who resides in a pet shop called Hannibal's Animals.

And it doesn't take long for DS Broome and DS Cartwright to piece together a possible link to Green's disappearance which is the one case that Nesbitt's character never cracked.

Another figure from the old days of Vipers, Richard Armitage's photographer Ray Levine is also drawn into the mystery as the bodies pile up.

But will Megan's past come back to haunt her with blood being spilled?

It's hard to know where to begin when describing just how shockingly bad 'Stay Close' is.

Should you choose the sequence where Ken and Barbie dance in a forest to a ballroom version of Radiohead's 'Creep'?

Or when they prance around the street before trying to torture another victim?

Could it be DS Broome serenading Vipers' rough diamond Lorraine Griggs at a piano in the nightclub?

Maybe it's the laboured banter between Ray Levine and his mate, Youssef Kerkour's Fester who is a bouncer at a Blackpool bar mitzvah?

Or what about DS Cartwright's baby talk to her toddler son Seamus on a smartphone while a grisly murder photo is on her computer screen.

'Stay Close' just keeps delivering one cackhanded scene after another to the point where you swear Brocklehurst and the writers are doing it for a bet.

With toe curlingly awful dialogue and lazily developed plots and characters, the cast flounder.

Jumbo, Armitage, Francis and Parish try their best with the flimsy scripts they are given but to no avail.

Nesbitt and Joyner try a different tack, pretending they are in a proper ITV police drama but that soon wears thin.

They are frankly not helped by Shalloo's unbelievable performance as their boss.

Izzard seems to spend most of his time with his eyes shut, as if that denotes heroin addiction.

Or maybe he is hoping if he sleeps his way through it, we might all just forget 'Stay Close' is on his acting CV.

O'Grady and Gilbert are saddled with the worst roles.

Their assassins are so incredibly weird you could be convinced they are actually appearing in the surrealist of sketch shows.

Indeed if Paul Whitehouse or Vic Reeves were to suddenly appear as outlandish catchphrase characters in their scenes, you wouldn't be that surprised.

Tonally, their performances are all over the place, as Ken and Barbie pirouette from skittish dancing to jarringly gory violence. 

A very wooden Boatman spends most of his time shouting a lot about how he needs to find his boy, while Kerkour fires off lame quips like a gun enthusiast at a shooting range.

Bethany Antonia, Tallulah Byrne and Dylan Francis dutifully do their bit as the Shaw children but when they do get drawn into the action, they fail to really engage our sympathies.

As O'Hara and Heyman's odd miniseries hurtles towards its rather unconvincing and chaotic final episode, with one ridiculous revelation after another, you feel you deserve a New Year's Honour for having the patience to follow this mess of a show to its embarrassing conclusion.

As you watch 'Stay Close,' you may find yourself also wondering how Coben extracted a multi-million dollar deal from Netflix to turn 14 of his novels into TV series or shows.

After 2020's 'The Stranger,' his Polish drama 'The Woods,' last year's Spanish show 'The Innocent,' his French tale 'Gone for Good' and now this, surely Netflix must be questioning the wisdom of the deal?

Too poor to merit cult status, you suspect even Tommy Wiseau would turn down a role in it.

('Stay Close' was released on Netflix on December 31, 2021) 

Lokasi:

Berbagi :