The Red Riding Trilogy: 1983

This third part of the mini series presents once more a different genre with this very insightful and philosophical conclusion. The movie is less darker and brutal than the first two ones and talks more about hope than desperation. The movie talks about moral, forgiveness and remorse and presents once more a few new and profound characters.

The movie has three main actors and begins with the fact that another young girl has been kidnapped nine years after the last murder.

The remorseful cop Maurice Jobson, played by the brilliant David Morissey, wants to stop the insanity and begins to question the corruption, the violence and lies within the police. He falls in love with a clairvoyant and wants to save the kidnapped girl with her while his partners try to find a scapegoat for the new crime. He realizes that he has done some mistakes in his life and wants to change. He is now looking for forgiveness, truth and justice.

The second main character is the fat and disillusioned lawyer John Piggott, played in a rather mediocre way by Mark Addy, whose father was one of the corrupt police officers that has been killed in mysterious circumstances, helps after much hesitation the mothers of the two scapegoats that are or have to go to prison for crimes they didn't commit.

The third main character is the young and homosexual BJ, brilliantly played by Robert Sheehan, who has escaped from Torkshire and travels around the country to come back for a last act of vengeance.

All those three characters come together in a grand finale. But before this conclusion, the story meanders back and forth through space and time and creates connections to the first two movies and even new connections beyond that. Those scenes help to create once more some very diversified and profound characters but it is sometimes difficult to follow this pattern and to understand what is happening right now or in the past. There are many flashbacks and changes of space and time in the movie and that makes it less dynamical and intense to watch than the first two ones. The strong point of the movie are the interesting characters and the fact that many points are explained and many questions are answered to that haven't been before.

But I still felt disappointed about the conclusion. It seems too simple to me and I would have liked to have some more original explications, for example concerning the connection of the businessman Dawson to the murders.

Because of the conclusion and less intense atmosphere, this third part is the weakest one of the series in my opinion. But I still gave seven stars because of the interesting characters and the fact that almost everything is explained in the conclusion of the movie. The philosophical style of this movie is very interesting but I preferred the drama style of the second or the first movie that was a great film noir and my favourite part of the series.

All in all, this trilogy is interesting to watch and really presents three different kinds of a movie and creates connections in between them in an interesting way. Artistically, those series are really well done and most of the actors did an amazing job. But there is a lack of suspense in this slow paced series and the criminal investigations are rather boring. It was a good idea to watch the series, but honestly, I wouldn't but it or watch it again for a while.

1974: 7,5 stars 1980: 7 to 7,5 stars 1983: 7 stars

And finally the loose ends are tied up in the last part of the acclaimed RED RIDING trilogy. This time around, a low-rent lawyer and a cop with a conscience combine forces to expose the child killer who has been eluding police from the very beginning.

I'm a sucker for a happy ending and this film gives us one - well, sort of one. I found the story punchier and although events become even darker - and more shocking, if that's even possible - there is hope, finally, in the full-on powerhouse ending.

What a coup in casting Mark Addy as the sympathetic lead (he's usually typecast as lovable rolly-polly types since THE FULL MONTY back in the day)! David Morrissey is given a chance to shine, too, putting memories of BASIC INSTINCT 2 into the distant past. The series definitely ends on a high and it's nice to have some closure after everything that happened.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

It's 1983, and another young girl has gone missing from the same school and the same area as a girl who was found dead with angel wings nearly ten years earlier. This throws the past and the present together in spectacular fashion, as the family of Michael Mishkin (Daniel Mays), the impaired man accused of the murder all those years ago, ask troubled lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy) to take his case and help him mount an appeal. The trouble is, Mays confessed and this is hard to appeal against. Instead, Piggott puts pressure on the local police to look into claims of police brutality and corruption in getting Mays's confession. But remorseful Detective Jobson (David Morrison) remembers his partner's unorthodox approach from years ago and tries to put things right, leading to a devastating conclusion that will shatter everything.

Red Riding has been a thinly rewarding show to get involved in. Maybe it's something you need to watch a few times to really pick everything up, but while it's pleased with itself as an intelligent and original drama, it comes off just as much as a confusing and muddled story that might have tried to be a little too clever for it's own good. This final part supposedly wraps everything up, but hardly in a neat and tidy fashion.

The concluding part of the whole shebang comes together like a nice looking car where all the components fall apart once you switch on the engine. While the most important parts seem to have been wrapped up smoothly, there still feels like a lot of subplots that haven't been taken care of or that maybe there was too much to take in anyway and by the end it's all blown your mind a bit. Atmospherically, the show's excelled but while the story keeps you glued to the end, it all ends up feeling like a bit too much style over substance and that's stopped it from being a brilliant series and instead an average one. ***

The seemingly untouchable, corrupt West Yorkshire police, and the true evil mastermind behind the child abductions and murders of the last 14 years, can't resist doing it again. "Red Riding: 1983" sets the story that another young girl has vanished from the same area, nine years earlier. "Red Riding: 1983" cycles back to the terrible events set in motion in "Red Riding: 1974", when a series of young girls went missing and a mentally retarded man, Michael Myshkin (Mays), was wrongfully convicted for the crime. Detective Inspector Maurice Jobson (Morrissey), a regular if mostly background character in the first two films, becomes our first focal point here as a man deeply wrecked by his complicity in the Yorkshire Constabulary's general lawlessness.

In 1983, another young girl disappears, and Jobson decides to do some actual police work--and reopening several old cases his colleagues would prefer to keep closed--and sniffing around the likes of series constant Rev. Lawes (Mullan, with the omniscience and eerie stillness of a very dark angel). Simultaneously, in the trilogy's first dual narrative, another lead emerges in the form of John Piggott (Addy), a sad-sack solicitor and Yorkshire native who reluctantly agrees to file an appeal on behalf of Myshkin. Piggott marks the trilogy's most uncomplicated hero.

It may come as a surprise that the ending of "Red Riding: 1983" adds a dose of hope to its brackish main course. "Red Riding: 1983" provides a fitting conclusion to a whole that is, in some ways, greater than the sum of its parts." Red Riding" is an effective crime thriller, but it's an even more striking drama about the dark parts of the human soul and man's capacity for inhumanity. The third movie represents the middle ground between the promising-but-uneven" Red Riding: 1974" and its sequel, the shocking and haunting "Red Riding:1980." This time around, there's less in the way of a stand- alone narrative as screenwriter Tony Grisoni, working from the novel by David Peace, stitches closed various plot holes. The finale doesn't answer all of our question, but it provides a sense of closure and clears up a number of nagging questions left over from the previous two segments.

What we can take away from all of this is not just an investigation into a series of child murders. This is an in-depth character study of three (or four) main protagonists--as they slowly unfold a ring of corruption surrounding an era of a very specific locale of the UK. As things get "hairy" within each of our main characters' worlds, rather than dig deeper into the case, they instead spend three quarters of the running time of each film digging deeper into their own psych--and begin to like what they see in themselves less and less.

In two words, brutal and disturbing. But also complex, adult, respecting the viewer who wants more than a linear tale with loose ends all strung up very neatly; its a close-up of a society in decay, of a police force that fails to have a moral compass, of some dark perversions lurking where one least expects to find them. The performances are uniformly excellent, and each of the tales, separated by a few years, showcase a specific individual into whose motivations and feelings we are allowed access: a journalist, a federal investigator, a local policeman. Be warned that there are graphic scenes of torture, that often a clue dropped in Part 1 is not picked up until Part 3, that character motivations, like those of our own, are not always crystal clear. There are 300 minutes of intensity, filmed with immediacy if not always clarity, and worth an immersion for the willing viewer.