Liaison (2023)

Across the board there are some genuinely excellent performances from a top-tier cast, hitting their marks and keeping things engaging. However, all the polished production values money can buy are no match for carefully crafted tension.

Liaison is a show that leaves little to no impression on us after watching it, mainly because it feels like a cynical pastiche of espionage thrillers that came before it.

[Vincent Cassel and Eva Green] sail through these six episodes with the laidback efficiency we’ve come to expect from such professionals. The real problem is everything around them, serving a tired spycraft story that lumbers from trope to trope, even as it tries to spice things up with more contemporary nuances.

Liaison doesn’t quite earn the right to take itself so seriously, and doesn’t quite honor its commitment to the global scope of its narrative. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot here to be admired, but the best elements are sabotaged by a certain laziness in writing.

There’s perhaps a decent feature film to be found in Liaison, but reveals that might have felt a bit anticlimactic at 100 minutes feel irredeemably disappointing at six hour-long episodes.

The plot’s endless involutions interrogate the limits of personal and patriotic loyalty. Green is game even though it's never quite clear if, as one character wonders, “there’s an actual person under there”. But the real reason for sticking around is Cassel, whose anti-hero of the old school is rugged and enigmatic and intriguingly unprincipled.

At best this is a serviceable espionage potboiler, and, with a cast this good, you would not be blamed for expecting it to be a bit better than so-so.

A rather delicious thriller. ... In the intricacy of its storytelling "Liaison" does require our undivided attention, which is not an obstacle as regards Ms. Green and Mr. Cassel: They are hardly lusty teenagers, but they generate considerable heat.

Sadly, the writing here by Virginie Brac feels routine and uninspired, going through the espionage motions that push the characters down tracks that give them nothing interesting to do while they’re traveling to their destinations.

The decisions they make don’t seem to stem naturally from who they are, but from what the narrative needs them to be. Regrettably, this makes it nearly impossible to find anything to engage with in what amounts to a mediocre B thriller.