TV Watch: Ride or Die

Ride or Die was advertised as a light romp with the wacky idea that a housewife discovers her best friend is actually an assassin.  twenty years ago, this has Sandra Bullock in it, and is a 100 minute movie with non-stop jokes that makes its money back with re-runs on TBS.  And, I'd argue, in the ads Amazon put out that was more or less what was sold.  And, fair.  The premise seems a bit of dark comedy.  Enjoy.

But the show pretty swiftly makes it clear - forget the ads.  This show has more in common with action-dramas of the past fifteen years than it does with late 00's-era comedies.  Sure, it has great comedic bits, but imagine my surprise as the comedy was pushed further and further to the edges, the inescapable result of 9 hour-long episodes based in a world of assassins, mob money and betrayals.  

It's not exactly The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but it isn't trying to be.  Nor is it trying to be The Bourne Identity, John Wick or "a ballet of violence" for violence's sake.  When violence does break out, it's not just goofy fun.  People get very hurt and/or killed.

The big draw, was, of course, pairing Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham as two pals.   Spencer - who has played a wildly diverse set of roles over her career - plays a very buyable character in the brilliant wife of a British MP - the secret brains of their family operation.  But she uses her wits to, like, get to the piece she wants at the antiques sale before the other guys and plot out how to push through her husbands agenda in Parliament.  

Spencer's husband, on the way to a gala, states he wants a divorce.  At that same gala, Waddingham is tasked with assassinating a fixer (Ed Skrein).  Turns out that fixer was tangled up with Spencer's husband and some very shady business.  

Bullets start flying, and Spencer - evacuated by Waddingham - learns Waddingham is a highly trained assassin, and that's just, like, the set-up of the set-up.  We have eight more episodes to go.  

There's also plot threads including Waddingham's man-in-the-chair (Calam Lynch) and the daughter of their Q (Savannah Steyn) who wind up getting involved.

Unlike most of these country-hopping espionage-type movies, the writing grounds the characters in an emotional reality, even if the world itself feels about as believable as a Bond movie.  Yes, there's a good multi-level plot about the Albanian mob, political corruption and a revenge story that dominates the back half of the series.  But even that revenge is a reflection of emotional realities within the world of the show.  In what could be a "yeah, it was fine" world of attractive women high kicking Eastern European men in the face, something I fully support as a genre, this one feels remarkably fresh.

Thus, the A-plot is really uncovering the challenges to the friendship of these two women and the not-so-casual discovery that everything Debbie (Spencer) believed about the two people she loved and trusted, was a lie with a lot of darkness under it.  While Judith (Waddingham) feels the onlyw orld she's ever known was also built on a foundation of quicksand.

Spencer's character is more fleshed out than I expected.  There's a whole character arc that never gets mentioned out loud that she's absorbed a lot from all those mysteries she doesn't particularly like reading - she's quick to employ tricks she read somewhere or comes to herself based on that craftiness.  It's very clever.

I am unsure what the story is, but that's two major shows Waddingham has starred in where it starts with a simple enough premise and by the end you're totally pulling for her, and now that light comedy sure feels like a heartbreaking drama.  I'm not sure I've seen anyone who can shift to heartbreak dn vulnerability this well on screen.

We were definitely watching for the plot

SPOILERS

Over nine episodes, a *lot* occurs.  Like a lot of these shows, it can wind up feeling like too much and not enough.  And if you also know the genre, you can kind of assume a few things will happen which absolutely do occur.  Example:  our fixer was being way too handsome and uncharacteristically kind for what he was supposed to be to survive to the end of the show.  

That doesn't mean there aren't surprises.  I raised my eyebrows at the high body count of characters with speaking lines, even if the logic of why those people were killed makes sense.  I was pleasantly surprised by many of Debbie's character decisions.  And that the show all but sidelines Judith for two episodes recovering from an injury. Or that they even let a main character get that injured.

Overall, I enjoyed who the real villain was - Redback - and the full story that spilled out about her.  Lots of theatrics to her plan that seemed at odds with a background in cooly efficient murder, but I think they justified it plotwise.  

What I didn't buy was that Debbie would turn on Judith after the woman who was clearly a villain decided to just hurt Debbie and Judith's friendship.  Like, yes, plotwise it works for the overall emotional story they're telling.  Logically, it sure seemed like what would hurt Judith more would be to know she didn't save her friend.  Making Debbie sad just didn't seem like the move of a crazed assassin - let alone how she'd even *know* that.

The final two episodes are thrilling, but rely entirely too much on one person guessing correctly exactly what another person will do, or even deduce.  You can do one or two of those, but after your third "and they just happened to know exactly where to go...  and that person planned for that", it just starts feeling like nonsense.  Fun nonsense, but nonsense.

I think somewhere in the penultimate episode I grokked that they were setting things up for another season of the show, and I kind of wish they hadn't?  It always feels ham-handed when the last ten minutes of a 9 hour show where everyone has arcs that have been activated and achieved start doing things for very obvious plot reasons rather than because we're getting closure on season 1.  I kind of think - until you know you have a Season 2 guarantee, you need to introduce those flips in the first episode of the second season.  

But, man, are there a lot of shows about not being able to trust the shady organization to which one has dedicated their life, always led by some old guy who has been lying for decades.  And not once do these movies or shows ever have the highly competent super-assassin just do what they're good at and kill the guy in his bathtub, no muss, no fuss.  It always gets raised to Batman-Villain level kookiness.

I'll also complain that the show got in its own way during a crucial scene where Judith picks Debbie over her own career and life.  They should have just stayed on Waddingham and let her have that full 20 seconds in close-up.  We don't need to be force-fed flashbacks of stuff we *just saw*.

So it can feel like the airplane is barely holding together as we come in for a landing.  

Still, any landing you can walk away from, right?  

At the end of the day, you're really showing up for Spencer and Waddingham, so I'm not sure how much to actually complain about my personal bugaboos listed above.  I'm not sure, in a week, that's what I'll be thinking about when I think about the show.  But if they can get the mechanics of the assassin/ espionage stuff sorted out, this thing will be unstoppable.

In the meantime, the two leads - and the supporting cast - are probably worth checking in for all on their own.  The bonus of focusing so much on character and those interactions is that we get some stunning work - especially in a genre where people usually just stoically shrug off bullet wounds.

I do think it's very cool that two women - neither of whom previously played action stars - are leads in an action show that's apparently doing really, really well.  So we will get that second season.  And I'll be there, I suppose.

FUN FACT:  When I looked up what a "Whiptail" before the show completely blew up, what came up was "nickname: lesbian lizard".  It's apparently an all-female species of reptile from Mexico that breeds through parthenogenesis or something.  But that nickname sure made me wonder what was in the original script.