Fuego cruzado

Repetitive and ridiculous in equal,measure. No discernible plot. Muddled direction and devoid of direction. Unconvincing characterisation. Even inTenerife, the armed police would have been there in minutes. I could write more but this nonsense doesn't warrant the effort. Oh dear, I have to write more to meet the minimum review criteria. I'm off to make a cup of tea now. Then I will switch over and watch a documentary about fish. This review may seem meaningless but believe me, it is far more compelling than this over hyped nonsense. Rubbish. Absolute trash. There aren't even pretty landscapes of the island.

A trio of families head for a holiday in Spain, but the relaxation is cut short when gunmen open fire on the unsuspecting holiday makers.

Well, you couldn't escape the adverts for this one, The BBC definitely plugged this one, it was everywhere.

Now I may be in the minority here, but I really enjoyed the first episode, and despite one or two quibbles, it grabbed my attention, and had me on the edge of my seat.....

Episodes two and three however, oh Dear, it fell apart quite quickly, the events were just impossible to believe, and the relationships that we were told about, they just didn't seem realistic or even possible.

The idea was a truly great one, a chilling concept, and as many people are aware, similar atrocities did actually happen.

Jason, truly the most ridiculous character on the box this year, he turns out exactly as I predicted, very lazily written.

The acting was very good, Keeley Hawes was excellent, I also enjoyed Josette Simon and Daniel Ryan, they were very good, just badly served for the most part.

5/10.

Keeled Hawes having great difficulty acting to the lines of this one. The script and dialogue are extremely poor and the resort makes you think you're watching Benidorm with guns. Only one episode in but I'll be surprised if this gets any better. So a bunch of people are stuck on an island and someone shooting at them I'm certainly not giving away any spoilers with that. How long can you act scared for and make phone calls back home when you're on holiday Shane you're being attacked for no rhyme or reason. You'll be happy to know as well there's plenty of overacting in this new drama. I'll give it the second episode but I can't see it improving.

From the beginning I found the demographic of the family/friends ensemble totally unconvincing.

It was so confusing and even at the end I had no idea who the children's parents were.

The rest of it was unconvincing as well. A load of people running around acting scared did not actually convey the horror of the situation. One assumes this was based on the attack on tourists in Tunisia in 2015 when 38 people were murdered.

A much more convincing film of this genre is the Norwegian film, Utøya 22. Juli (2018).

I don't know whether it is the writing, storyboarding or editing that is at fault, but there was a distinct lack of continuity.

You have terrorists shooting people indiscriminately and without any forethought except when they are faced with a featured cast character ... then they don't shoot them. They allow themselves to be engaged in pointless dialogue. Then there was the clichéd scene of a terrorist and tourist grappling on the floor trying to wrestle a gun free, with the usual inevitable result.

The scene when the tourist looks on dumbly at a terrorist confrontation and walks stupidly into a knife is just embarrassing.

Why did Keely Hawes character receive a police commendation when she was not a serving police officer and it happened in a foreign land?

At best it would surely have been a civil award.

And her going back into the force just seemed unbelievable.

I really lost interest as the three part drama progressed, particularly the last episode which was boring.

I like Keeley Hawes and Lee Ingleby, both excellent actors but they struggled to keep this ship afloat. It was an uneasy mix of domestic potboiler/soap meets Die Hard and will probably disappoint the audiences for both.

It wasn't awful but it wasn't great and it didn't feel authentic, the action scenes at the beginning were quite flat. It wasn't helped by the fact that we knew nothing about the attackers and their motives. If all they wanted to do was kill people randomly why didn't they run out of ammunition very quickly? Everyone on the island had a mobile but no-one called the cops...

Seemed more C5 than BBC though to be fair looked like it had a good budget but the direction was a bit off. As it progressed it turned into a bit of a turkey I'm afraid. One to give a swerve.