Rating: ** ½
Don’t get me wrong. Girl Taken the new Paramount+ series in six episodes, packs in quite a punch. Based on the bestseller Babydoll by Hollie Overton it is a pageturner on screen, keeping us glued till the last.Chapter by Chapter.
But is that all? I expected much more here than a pulpy kitschy rendition of an abduction tale with a lead performance by Alfie(Game Of Thrones) Allen as the closeted psycho Rick Hansen who covers up his deprivations by posturing as an English teacher who one rainy morning, kidnaps one of his students.
There begins the tortuous journey to find the missing girl. That the missing girl Lily(Tallulah Evans) has a twin sister Abby(Delphi Evans) is just one of those things which make the potentially relevant series a kitschy rudderless game of groans with plenty of ham with mustard on top.
The plot propulsions are ruinously over-dramatic. And worse, sleazy.After Lily is rescued the series goes so over-the-top it feels like a 1960s Bollywood melodrama directed by Kalpataru with the twins fighting over the attention of one boy. Hum, tum aur woke? Both the twins get to be pregnant at some point of the dangerously steep and vertiginous storytelling.
The paternity twist at the end seems like one more attempt to titivate what is clearly not an abduction tale per se. Attempts to give the characters some weight beyond the pulpy predilections fail. Every character seems more flash than flesh.
Jill Halfpenny plays the mother of the twins. The actress struggles, along with her character, to make sense of a crime that transcends all human rationale. Vikash Bhai , an interesting actor of Indian origin, plays the investigative office,he struggles to give shape to his amorphous role. Clearly the moment he has an affair with the twins’ mom, his presence is compromised.
I could see the actors asking the director for the way ahead, only to be told to do their job and go home.
In prison the kidnapper, played with narrow-eyed perniciousness by Alfie Allen, is “protected” by a plus-sized female cop who orders him in an isolated room to go down on his knees. And it isn’t to clean the floor.
What the series lacks is sensitivity and refinement. Although it doesn’t go into details of Lilly’s torture for the five years that she was confined in cabin(how the hell does the bastard get away with it for so long? Having a naïve blindly devoted wife helps), her healing and rehabilitation are overridden by the melodramatic writing which goes all out to be a whammy.But knocks itself out into a whimper.
