Two Weeks to Live, episode 1 review: Maisie Williams's black comedy is disappointingly derivative
A lingering shot of a boring British A-road, on a dull, grey day. Suddenly: NORTH OF ENGLAND flashes on the screen in huge, white, comic-book letters. The funky bass slap of Stayin’ Alive kicks in. Oh ho, says the show, you’re watching something a little bit different here. A fact, sadly, that is lost on the viewer, who is momentarily confused as to why they seem to be watching Killing Eve, when they’re sure they turned on Sky One’s new comedy-drama Two Weeks to Live.
The comparisons don’t end there – a cheerful approach to violence, a heroine who is a dab hand with the pointy end of things, a British comedy-of-manners melded with John Wick – but being slightly derivative of Killing Eve (and a few other shows, including Sky One’s recent Hitmen, starring Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins) isn’t Two Weeks to Live’s greatest crime. Starring Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones’s Arya Stark) and Sian Clifford (Fleabag’s “Fleabag’s sister”) – a two-for-one on “can they escape the role that made them?” – the tongue-in-cheek six-parter suffers because it only has one joke: incongruousness. It’s not a bad joke, but, boy, it’s old.
Williams is Kim, a cherub-faced young woman who has been kept in almost total isolation by her paranoid mother (Clifford) and taught to be a ruthless survivalist in rural Scotland, ever since she witnessed her father being assassinated as a young girl. Now, however, she has escaped her mother’s clutches, stolen the SUV, and, despite knowing next to nothing about the outside world, set off down south to finally avenge her father’s death. And, yes, the script makes it perfectly clear that it knows Williams played Arya, who also sought her to avenge her father’s death.
Her first ever visit to a pub leads Kim into befriending Nicky (the charismatic Mawaan Rizwan) and his dimwit brother, Jay (Taheen Modak), who trick her into believing that the world will end in two weeks, speeding up her pursuit of the man who murdered her dad. As a premise for a knockabout comedy, it’s rather nice, but Gaby Hull’s ultra-wry script constantly falls over itself in a bid to impress you. And ever since Pulp Fiction’s “Royale with cheese” moment – Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta’s hitmen calmly shooting the breeze about burgers before going about their bloody work – the joys of incongruous assassins have been diminishing.
There are moments – the supremely watchable Clifford sells an excellent gag about Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, Sean Pertwee pops up for an enjoyable cameo – but Williams struggles to straddle a role that requires her to be an ice-cold killer one minute and a goofball klutz the next. There’s a not-displeasing silliness to it, but you know you’re on to a loser when it’s been done before, and better, by Mel and Sue.
