You can just imagine the television executive pitch meeting which gave birth to this week’s new flagship three-part BBC drama. “It’s Die Hard. In a hotel in the Canary Islands. With Keeley Hawes in the lead role.”
Which telly commissioner wouldn’t bite their own hand off for a premise like that?
Emotional, tense thriller
Broadcast over three nights, Crossfire (BBC One) started off by living right up to it, with an interlinked sense of emotional domestic drama and tense thriller action.
Hawes is Jo, a forty-something mum taking a laid-back holiday with her family and close friends in a coastal, middle-of-nowhere resort together.
It’s all very sun-kissed and relaxed, but there’s an escalating murmur of tension below the surface between Jo and her husband Jason (Lee Ingleby).
At first he seems dismissive and disparaging, talking her down in front of their friends and shouting at her by the pool after dinner.
Then a carefully-woven series of flashbacks reveals her own complicity in their marital disintegration, with his paranoia in the end justified by the revelation that she’s not only had an affair, she’s getting involved in another at this moment.
Chinar (Vikash Bhai) is one of the family friends they’re on holiday with, alongside his wife Abhi (Anneika Rose) and their children.
Shattered by a gunshot
The dreamy and idly carefree tone of the resort is shattered by a gunshot which kills one of the staff, and then a series of other shots which rip through the guests.
A stampede ensues, and the tension as the characters frantically hunt for their families while evading the gunmen is raw and gripping.
Jo, it turns out, is a former police officer, yet is she capable of rising to the occasion with the rifle belonging to hotel manager Mateo (Hugo Silva) in her hands?
And what does that courage look like anyway? Is it pulling the trigger, or keeping your family safe and your conscience intact through other means?
That’s the first episode, and the premise is tantalising. Did the rest of the series live up to it? That depends on what you wanted from it.
As an action thriller, Louise Doughty’s scripts keeps the attention long enough, playing on the series’ tagline of “what would you do?”
The story, of course, has strong echoes of the 2015 terrorist attack in Tunisia, which happened in very similar circumstances, despite the motive here being revenge and not terror.
As guns crack nearby and the living victims hold their breath, the tension remains high – for a time.
After an hour of creeping through corridors, hiding in rooms, losing children and – in a move which seems so foolish that it’s a relief when one of the background hotel staff remarks on it – calling friends and potentially giving their location away, that tension has been sapped somewhat.
A bit of an anti-climax
By the third episode it was gone completely, with the crisis quickly resolved and most of the remaining energy devoted to an aftermath of bereavement, guilt, life-changing injury and profound post-traumatic stress back in England.
Early on, Jason publicly accuses Jo of being a “fundamentally dishonest and cowardly human being.”
While she was undoubtedly put to the emotional test here, couldn’t it have been just a bit more exciting?
