A quiet working day in the centre of Pittsburgh is momentarily disrupted when a group of masked armed men walk into a bank and, with ruthless efficiency rob it and leave within minutes. However a passing cop, a security van and an FBI agent all come together at the wrong moment for the gang and the result is a gun battle in the street. Retreating back into the bank, the groups leader, Mr Wolf immediately sets up a hostage situation and prepares to defend the bank. Outside, Police negotiator Horst Cali learns that he is facing a group of Iraq veterans and political pressure starts to mount on him and his working style.
This got a bit of a mention in The Times and Guardian and it made me decide to check it out. Although it was not brilliant, the show was short enough both in terms of running time of each episode (if you forward the adverts) and the overall season (eight episodes). To be honest the main thing that grabbed me about it was that it does seem to have been somewhat of an acting "busman's holiday" for a chunk of the cast of HBO's brilliant The Wire. Sadly the overriding thought in my head seeing so many of them together in one place was that it is genuinely unlikely any will ever have work that good again, but still it was nice to see them. On The Kill Point itself, the series throws the viewer right into the bank job and the first episode is pretty frantic. In the style of 24 it tries to keep this up and some episodes do really well on it, but it does have frequent and clunky dips in pace that frustrate.
These aside, it must also be said that the whole series is not quite a great example of how to maintain pace and deliver within a thriller. The themes surrounding Iraq are held up like billboards rather than woven into the story and characters and likewise some emotional content is ham-fisted in delivery and just serves to suck dramatic tension out of the series rather than increasing it by adding depth. That said it still functions at a level that the majority will find distracting, if never really gripping. The direction gives proceedings tension but somehow never nails "urgency" in the way that I wanted.
The cast back up the "solid but not special" feel that the whole thing has, with reasonable performances from reasonable actors. Leguizamo leads the cast well with the strongest performance and character, getting the conflict and urgency in his character. Wahlberg is nearly as good when given the material but his grammar pedantry is nonsense (his own dialogue is full of "less" instead of "fewer" and such) and it is a crass quirk that doesn't work. Davidson is satisfyingly unhinged and works well with Grillo's incredibly buff (and I say this as a straight guy) and charming performance. The Wire's Fitzpatrick and JD Williams are both good but don't have much to do the latter in particular quite hard to watch as he doesn't have a lot to get his teeth into in the way he did in The Wire. Although really this could be said of all of them but not in the same way. Hyatt has more time on screen than in The Wire (where she was Avon's sister) but she is not that good with it and she cannot get her character to work. Conversely Michael Williams seems to be unable to escape the wonderful character of Omar, although fan that I am, this is not a bad thing really. He has dialogue that could have been given to Omar (with a bit of tightening) but for the majority of the series he appears to be in his own show, totally detached in terms of plot and material from the rest of the goings-on! Enough "The Wire" chat though, I am conscious that I am already a bore on the subject, but the connection does add a novelty value to this show that it probably doesn't deserve. On its own terms, The Kill Point doesn't totally work but it has enough trash appeal to just about make it worth seeing if you want a couple of months of disposable distraction. It is far from being Dog Day Afternoon (although it has a touch of that), it lacks the urgency and pace of 24 (when it is good) and the writing lets it sag far too often for its own good but for the undemanding viewer it might just do the job.
