Litvinenko 2022 Tv Series Review Trailer Cast Crew

When truth is stranger than fiction, why novelize it? This is the problem besetting ITVX's new drama Litvinenko, which stars David Tennant as the eponymous Russian defector and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, who was fatally poisoned, apparently by Russian state agents, in London with polonium-210. .

Maybe ITV just had another part of their contract with David Tennant left and thought, “You know what? Shave his head, tuck him into a hospital bed, squint a little, and he'll be the spitting image of…” Then he built a threadbare show around her.

Stars: Margarita Levieva, Mark Bonnar, Neil Maskell

And he is shabby. A painstaking, by-the-numbers effort that's noticeably less riveting and, perhaps more importantly, since the murder of an innocent man is the pivotal event, less moving than the real-life unfolding. The extraordinary poisoning and later death of him appeared, by Alexander Litvinenko's own design, on the front pages to bring home the horror of himself and the Putin regime. This four-part drama, which should have made it live again, is a grim shadow of something that largely dispenses with Litvinenko himself at the end of the first episode, then focuses on what can't have been as dull a police procedural as them. represent it

As it is, Litvinenko opens with Alexander ("Sasha" to friends and family) going home to his wife and his children and celebrating the arrival of their naturalization papers after a long day in the city. Shortly after dinner, he begins to vomit blood. We then cut to a hospital 16 days later and two cops, DI Brent Hyatt (Neil Maskell) and DS Jim Dawson (Barry Sloane), in an exhibition elevator, explaining to each other why they have the "Edwin Carter" case. ". “Counterterrorism doesn't want it because it's a homicide. And Homicide doesn't want it because nobody's really dead. But the real reason nobody wants him is that everyone thinks the man has gone mad.

Still, at least the stage is set for an excitingly tense battle between the skeptical police and the dying time trial! Except that the skepticism of the police somehow disappears with the mere contact with Litvinenko, and we go directly to the taking of statements and more exposure, this time from a hospital bed. He explains that he is not Edwin Carter, but a former Russian Federal Security Service officer who escaped to London after refusing to kill a list of alleged enemies of the state. There he wrote a book about the corruption of his country and became a marked man. He knows he was poisoned and he knows who ordered it: "Vladimir Putin." Dum-dum-daaaah! Except, of course, not, because we know that, and nothing about the dramatization of the story so far has added anything to it in human or narrative terms.

And so it goes. Most surprising of the entire opening episode is the size of the urine sample sent to the Aldermaston lab to try to identify the toxin that is killing Litvinenko. Damn gallons of stuff. He would have hoped that the Atomic Weapons Establishment could do more with less, almost as much as he might hope that he was watching a drama that left him with neither the time nor the inclination to ponder such questions. But we are where we are.

The script is pitiful. At one point, DI Hyatt says that he feels guilty that Sasha's wife has to wait outside while her dying husband is interviewed. "The only way to avoid feeling this way, Brent," says his colleague, "is to catch the bastards." Maybe it would sound better in Russian.

By far the best written and most involving moment is the verbatim reading of Litvinenko's statement, read posthumously by his friend to the waiting press, professing his thanks to the police and doctors, his love for his family, and delivering a blow final against Putin. "May God forgive you for what you have done to me and to Russia."

But art should not be, by definition, it is not, a mere transcription. Litvinenko died in 2006. This should not have been a rush job. There has been an opportunity to work on the story of his life and death and transmute it, especially at a time when dictatorial regimes, violence and governmental lawlessness are on the rise, into something better, broader, more meaningful than this.