You saw you want a revolution?
Maybe you should watchGuerrillainstead.
Theres something ofThe Americansin Ridleys new franchise, thoughGuerrillalacks any of that shows wicked wit, to its detriment.
Credit: Sky UK Limited/SHOWTIME
But it does have Idris Elba sporting aPlaygirl-ready mustachioed beefcake, so there is that.
Complaining about it even a little makes you a suspected radical and assures you greater marginalization.
So youre a troublemaker, says the white guy handling the interview and denying him employment.
If Marcus gets that job, perhaps none ofGuerrillahappens.
Jas Mitra (Freida Pinto), a child of immigrants, is a nurse.
Like her boyfriend Marcus, shes a communist who came of age in the counter-culture sixties.
His passion for causes might stop at bohemian parties full of heated talk of liberation and hazy-headed free love.
Jas dumped him because she needed a man of action like Marcus and her father.
These relational intrigues are essential to a show that interrogates the motivational make-up of would-be culture-changers.
How much is political?
How much is personal?
Can those two things even be separated?
Whether Jas is master of her issues or mastered by them is left for us to decide.
Each gains more depth and changes significantly as the story unfolds.
Theres nothing romantic about Ridleys depiction of revolutionary life, and the show is more interesting for it.
Ridley zeroes in on the ironies of this situation.
Theyre still governed by survival-of-the-fittest marketplace forces; they still have to toil for The Man.
Yet his arc is as complex as his racism.
Still, the character still comes off as a broad, even cartoonish cut-out of white villainy at first.
Elbas portion of the show provides another source of conflict and another expression of mirroring.
Elba fans be warned: His role is small.
Like Kent,Guerrillais a lot of talk and not much action, though the action itdoeshave is impactful.
Theres meaning and design to the polished filmmaking.
He knows what matters most, the price paid by victim and perpetrator.
The moment in the premiere when Marcus pulls a trigger and his eyes blaze with what-have-I-done horror is searing.
Guerrillasuffers from being an episode too long and for being too conservative with its own tone.
They culminate with a line Im so fing cool thats layered with uncountable meanings and is absolutely chilling.
Watching them evolve or devolve?
