This Guy Ritchie knock-off turns the world of arms dealing into a geezer thriller
The biggest surprise of Sky’s new action series, Atomic, is that it’s based on the rather serious-sounding non-fiction bestseller The Atomic Bazaar, by William Langewiesche. The book’s grim message is that the black market in smuggled uranium has gone – forgive the pun – nuclear. It is now easier than at any previous time in history for terrorists and renegade regimes to acquire the raw materials for weapons of mass destruction.
That’s no laughing matter, yet Atomic uses the concept of a world flooded with illicit uranium shipments as a jumping-off point for a geezer thriller in the tradition of Guy Ritchie at his worst. The intrusive soundtrack – which sounds like the playlist of someone with wildly random tastes in music (who would want to listen to Hot Chocolate and Radiohead in the same sitting?) – and blaring action sequences are combined with bantering dialogue that sounds as if it was originally written with Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones in mind.
But it’s the unconventional action hero Alfie Allen (SAS: Rogue Heroes) who leads – and he brings a twitchy, lean-burning energy that never quite clicks with the heist thriller tone. He looks bored throughout as Max, a drug smuggler who has criss-crossed the Sahara moving product between North Africa and Europe. His latest mission is even more off the books than usual: he must travel to Lebanon and retrieve two precious statues. Unbeknownst to him, the cargo is stuffed with enough uranium to cause global-level mayhem.
He is ambushed early in the first of five episodes by desert raiders. As luck would have it, their ranks include a mysterious Englishman (Shazad Latif) keen to stay off the radar. Even more mysteriously, this disillusioned Islamic fundamentalist turns on his former allies, gunning them down and allowing Max to survive.
Why does he do it? The answer is not forthcoming – and Max didn’t seem all that curious about his new friend’s motivations. Nor did it prevent Max and JJ (Allen’s character teasingly compares his new travelling companion to the British militant Jihadi John) from immediately striking up a strange bedfellows-type chemistry.
Atomic is eager to portray the pair as a charming odd couple. JJ is cynical about human nature and ruthless in dealing with his enemies; Max believes in love and is forever mooning over a snap of his girlfriend (Charlie Murphy). But it never feels plausible that Max and JJ would stick together instead of going their separate ways at the first opportunity.
Thrown together, the two Brits abroad blunder from one disaster to the next. They are separated from the drugs with which they are supposed to pay for the statues – only to then opportunistically swipe the relics in a stand-off in Beirut. They have by this point also rescued a young African child, who meets a sticky fate immediately afterwards when friends of JJ’s desert raiders catch his trail – a jarring scene that lands awkwardly amid the action movie vibes.
Allen is a formidable screen presence, but his moody aura is a bad match for a show that wants to be a ridiculous, romping adventure. He’s great at communicating moral ambivalence – but that doesn’t work with a script that demands he play a conventional action hero, larking from one danger zone to the next.
The idea of criminals smuggling weapons-grade plutonium around the world is obviously alarming. So it it is a shame that Atomic spins the ominous premise into a tale of two likely lads in over their heads and running for dear life.
Any pretence to realism is further undermined by a blaring and intrusive score, which hits rock bottom in a toe-curling set-piece in which the duo’s flight with the uranium is soundtracked to ”Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ’N’ Roses.
The story moves at a decent clip, but it ought to feel much more plausible considering its roots in reality. It would seem that all the series’ good ideas have been defused long before it reached the screen.
‘Atomic’ continues next Thursday at 9pm on Sky Max. The full series is streaming on Now
