Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Jason Watkins, Robson Green, Sunetra Sarker, Indy Lewis, Amber James, Jenny Rainsford, Scott Karim, Amy Huberman, Simon Harrison, Christina Bennington, Lewis Ian Bray.
The stress of being a detective with a cold case hanging over your career is something that thankfully many of us will never understand or feel; and yet for the individual who has been stretched to breaking point, taking a partner, perhaps a family with them as they close themselves off from everything except the arrest that matters, that stress can consume and eat away at you till the end of time…or until that one person on the other side of the law decides they want to resume The Game.
The four-part serial of The Game starring Jason Watkins and Robson Green sees the pair facing off against each other in a match of wills as Detective Huw Miller, Jason Watkins, finds his retirement, blighted by the failure to capture the stalker who has dogged the local area, interrupted by the death of a friend and the subsequent moving in to the now vacant house by the man he comes to believe is the one he should have suspected all the time.
It is a brazen act, almost near psychopathic in nature, for the charming man who seems to make friends and impress people with ease, and it is with credit to Robson Green as an actor that he conveys this manner with every fibre of his being as he shoulders the terrible actions committed by his character, Patrick Harbottle.
The tension of the piece, written by Tom Grieves, overflows subtly, the fierceness that transpires as the stakes for the fallen detective grow ever larger is one that makes the most of Jason Watkins in a rile where he is given reign to feel grief, and see his relationship with his wife and daughter, played by the consummate Sunetra Sarker and Indy Lewis, dangle on the edge of a jagged precipice that comes in the form of a lack of trust and the actions of revenge, retaliation and reprisal by Harbottle.
It is rare to see such intensity on screen, especially when the viewer is gifted the knowledge of the simmering animosity and foregone conclusion of who the antagonist is before the fact. Such a reveal does not alter the integrity of the series, indeed with interesting and complex characters making their entrance, especially in the man originally arrested for the crimes at hand, played with tenderness and fear by Lewis Ian Bray, The Game is to be appreciated for its depth and adherence to the detective genre.
A decently told story given extra gravitas by its two main male leads, to view Robson Green in such a role especially is one worth investigating.
Ian D. Hall