Hostage: Netflix's 'fun, fast and brash potboiler'

The past few years have seen a proliferation of political thrillers reflecting fears that democracy "is in a state of peril", said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. The latest is Netflix's "Hostage", "a fun, fast and brash potboiler" starring Suranne Jones as decent, idealistic British prime minister Abigail Dalton. Eight months after she takes office, the NHS is on the verge of collapse due to a shortage of cancer drugs; France has the goods, but its right-wing president, Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy), makes a delivery conditional on Britain taking in more refugees from Calais.

The tempo is suddenly upped when Dalton's doctor husband (Ashley Thomas) is kidnapped in French Guiana, and his assailants threaten to kill him unless she resigns. Protocol demands the government won't negotiate with terrorists; but will this stand when it's the PM's husband's life that is at stake?

The real "hostage" turns out to be Dalton herself, said Keith Watson in The Daily Telegraph. She is "forever at the centre of a damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma", and Jones does a great job of "looking battered, bruised and relentlessly defiant". Alas, the series soon loses focus, throwing up endless plot twists and "an overflowing kitchen sink of contemporary issues".

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"I really, really wanted to love 'Hostage'," said Helen Coffey in The Independent. But the storyline is "wonky" and often silly. "I kept waiting for the 'aha' moment when I would finally get why all this was happening, and it never quite arrived."