Hostage, Netflix review - entente not-too-cordiale

Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV includes an Oscar nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, Hostage is a rather puzzling mix of political thriller and domestic drama which can never decide whether it’s serious or not.

In the lead role of British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, Suranne Jones is called upon to do political battle with the French president Vivienne Toussaint (a cold and frosty Julie Delpy), and their fraught power-women exchanges give the show some of its best moments. Especially the bit where Toussaint bounces Dalton into a policy decision by brazenly announcing it to the media without telling her.

In some respects it feels miraculously contemporary, not least in the way the set-up echoes M. Macron’s recent royal visit to the grovelling Starmer. Elsewhere, it resembles a job-lot of issues plundered from the headlines and then randomly scrambled in a narrative-blender (pictured below, Jones with Isobel Akuwudike as her daughter Sylvie).

The perennial crisis in the NHS rears its head – it has run out of drugs, patients are dying in droves, and, inexplicably, the UK’s only hope is to obtain supplies of drugs from the French. Yet despite the collapse of the health service, the French also want the Brits to accept a batch of ebola patients currently isolated on a cruise liner. You couldn’t make it up, but somebody did.

President Toussaint (who’s fighting for re-election back home) is also very insistent that French border police should be stationed in the UK because, as far as I could tell, immigrants are supposedly fleeing across the Channel from Blighty to France. If nothing else, it’s certainly counter-intuitive.

The calamities and crises keep piling up, and Suranne has her hands full coping with all that stress, fear and anxiety (Mme President urges her to “avoid tense expressions” in front of the camera). While she’s slugging it out with the perfidious Toussaint in Whitehall, her doctor husband Alex (Ashley Thomas, pictured below) is in the jungles of French Guiana with a group of Médecins Sans Frontières medics. Would you believe it, they get kidnapped by a sinister group of masked terrorists, whose modest proposal is that, if she wants her husband back alive, Abigail has to step down as Prime Minister.

Since this has occurred on French territory, Mme Toussaint is handed another massive chunk of leverage over her hapless British counterpart. If Dalton is nice to her, she might condescend to send in the Foreign Legion. You’d have thought Dalton’s security people would have vetoed her husband’s tropical jaunt on security grounds, to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. Doh!

As we proceed towards the denouement, all sorts of stuff comes tumbling out of the attic, such as the parlous state of Britain’s armed forces, dark mutterings about that all-purpose chimera the “far right”, and the dismal legacy of colonial adventurism. Martin McCann delivers an intense and intimidating performance as John Shagan, an ex-soldier with a huge tonnage of chips on his shoulder. And there’s a political sex-scandal for good measure.

Dramatic but daft, and weighty yet somehow weightless, it’s difficult to know where to place Hostage. Somewhere between State of Play and Yes Minister, I guess.

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