Non hai scelta - Il coraggio di una madre

Bad bits:

-Poorly done, misspelled, and overly foul subtitles. The F's and S's should be replaced with damn's and hell's. They would class the whole thing up, make the film accessible to a wider audience, and be more in line with who these professional characters are.

-Police who weren't as smart as they should have been.

-Many characters (the three young brunettes and the cop, the lawyer, and some other guy I don't remember) looked so much alike that I got them mixed up for a while. (Partially my fault for not having my eyes on the screen the whole time.)

-Red herrings that I would have liked to have seen resolved.

Good bits:

-Great locations.

-A maze of red herrings and twists and an ending I didn't fully expect.

-Loved the trucker character and his role, except for how violent he was at home.

-The bad girl was amazingly scary with her dead eyes.

Not another kidnap[ing show, I thought. (MISSING, Season 1, was already harrowing.) Anyway, becuz it's French, I stayed on. Just finished Episode 2; and it does get better. The plot if more complicated and layered.

You get the idea about what kind of series 'No Second Chance' is going to be almost from the start: a woman is shot, her husband murdered, and his daughter kidnapped; yet almost at once the former is out of hospital trying to track down the latter, frequently in open defiance of the police. For good measure, everyone around her seems to be a suspect. It makes sense neither logically nor psychologically, and in consequence I found it hard to get involved with the story, which ultimately is proven to involve at least five perpetrators of at least semi-independent misdeeds. I quite liked the detective who reminded me of Mitterand; but for a serious French policier, watch 'Spiral' instead.

This decade, several good French-language series have been produced, with intense plots and twists, suspense and mystery moments, good character actors, etc. Having seen more than ten of them, it is natural that one becomes picky, starts to compare and find flaws or cliches not providing additional value. True, I really like the benchmark, how the events broke loose, pondering on and over the motives, but then, when a doctor took matters into her own hands, the number of unrealistic moments enhanced (e.g. regarding the police activities and attitudes), and later, particularly in the last episode, the amount of twists was too much, some scenes were not reasoned, and the solution how all was resolved reminded me more of the US series than European ones. As for the cast/characters, Alexandra Lamy as Alice Lambert and Hippolyte Girardot as Commandant Cyril Tessier outperform the others; besides, some characters were apparently included for political correctness (well, the source novel is written by an American anyway). All is all, not bad, but not in line with similar French series, e.g. Disparue, Engrenages, and others. And having seen the series, I find the title not too felicitous.

I can't believe PBS picked up this thing. The police alternate reliably between stupidity and cruelty. With a little effort from the writers this might have been ok. Instead it's almost laughably weak.