and fear, paranoia, government death squad, mistakes, remedy... it's all here, and more!Max Raban (James Nesbitt) is a reporter with a couple of big problems, one, he's dead scared of daylight! So, he does a lot of stuff at night, midnight if necessary, like... scratching through rubbish bags to get (whatever), on one of his previous "scoops" he gets dirt on a politician, but then, his source hangs herself and Max is out of job. But then, a very-small time soccer player gets killed, and beheaded. Whilst raking through a bin to get info on the Defence Secretary who might be having an affair, he finds a document with "Headless Torso" and "Pugnus Dei" in it. What's this all about. So he goes digging.Gradually, the evidence builds up. He is followed, he sees his follower mugged and buys the phone and wallet from the muggers, and learns of a connection to a shady outfit called "Defence Concerns", so, of course, that's his next call. The boss is Daniel Cosgrave (Rupert Graves), the policy adviser is Alice Ross (Catherine McCormack). This movie might be McCormack's most impressive performance. She is so well dressed, and really becomes the part, it doesn't seem like acting at all. She even has a phobia of her own. (OCD?) and it fits in perfectly with all the rest of the story. The best scene is when Alice "gets" the memory stick and copies it... but Daniel hesitates as he leaves... and knows that he NEVER leaves his keys in the desk lock...Silliest scene is Alice, (fully clothed) in the bath!The writing is first-class, with lots of especially good scenes with memorable, and quotable lines. And there is nothing wrong with the directing and production. I liked it.

I have some time for Nesbit, he does the 'Brit Grit' TV dramas well, but in Midnight Man, he and the writers seem to be sleepwalking their way through the plot. The gimmick of a daylight phobia is inconsistently portrayed with his occasional, unexplained forays into daylight without much fuss, then suddenly he can't possibly go out?? Maybe he was just having good days and bad days, but the viewer is not to know the intricacies of this particular psychosis - so either explain it to us properly or don't bother - it's not like it actually adds anything to the story - it's just a quirk thrown in to make up for the poor writing. Oh, and on the subject of poor writing - being told off by his journo 'friend' for being paranoid. Now that might have flown before his wife was killed execution style, but to accuse him of paranoia the day after she opens her front door and receives a bullet in the forehead, is STUPID. Perhaps they wrote that bit of dialogue then moved the time line when her execution takes place...inconsistent and lazy. As for when the 'hit man', supposedly hired for his racist, keep England all white predilections, pours out his heart on the bus...WHAT?? Referring to cutting of the head of the boy as being traumatic, I didn't sign up for this stuff... ummm... last night you did kill his wife, wouldn't that be more traumatic as she was a middle class, Anglo British mum, and obviously not a bloody terrorist. Give me a break.At that point I tuned out.

A simple mini series about the war on terror and how that war gave a tremendous power to some people whose motivations were anything but sparkling clean or spick and span. In fact the first type of people in that caper were those who were fascinated by their own fear of the Moslem world. They were up in arms to defend the white Christian world of the old days, the days of the Crusades. Those were dangerous but moderately because they still had somewhere a conscience and would not kill with their own hands. The second type though was and is a lot more dangerous because they want to have the pretext and the justification, the alibi it is called in criminal investigations, to kill as many people as often as possible. They are just killers who want to keep their moral hands clean by finding a good patriotic and official coverage and cover-up. These people were in the SS under Hitler. Today they infiltrate the secret services of our countries and start pulling the ropes in their own directions, that is to say in order to kill as many people as possible in the category they hate, which is everyone except themselves. Imagine what harm they can create when they get to the top of the security ladder, and they do because they are so ideologically servile that any minister will fall for them and their velvety tongues, well the right velvet that can flatter the ministers in the right direction in such times of hostility. This series is capturing the problem exactly when the turning point has been reached, when the logic of the necessary waging of a war against Moslem terror becomes sour and of course runs into the efforts of a few to stop it. The film suggests it is the press that is doing the latter job of course. I must admit it has not looked like that over the last five years. The press has been discreet about the absurdity of the war on terror and if the historical pendulum is swinging the other way it is essentially due to the people who got their information from the Internet. Without the Abu Ghraib pictures on the Internet or some other documentaries about torturing in Guantanamo, we would still be in the logic of the war of terror of the bushman who had the brain of cockroach. The Internet has been the real medium that changed the minds of people. And then it became or is becoming political. But do not think you just have to swing the political pendulum from the right to the left or from the left to the right to change the world. The anti-Moslem phobia is still so well embedded in the minds of the left, like in France, better in the Parisian area where for the European elections the list of the Socialist Party contains two people with oriental names and Arab looks, and these two are the last on the list and so have no chance to be elected, whereas the right is proposing in the same region a list with its number two candidate, sure to be elected, who is a woman of Algerian origin who is the young unmarried mother of a little girl whose father's name has been systematically been kept secret. In one single person a symbol of the whole second generation of Arab immigrants in France who want to be successful, to be professional, to be free and independent and to have a good dose of responsibilities and power. The war on terror had completely perverted traditional attitudes and given total lee way to the most criminal racist and murderous minds in our society, that minuscule minority that should be kept under control all the time. I found this mini-series enlightening about the great turning point we have finally reached in our history.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

Utter cliché ridden trash. We have the hero with a gimmick (can't stand daylight) a dysfunctional family and a past he wants redemption for. We have MI5 or whatever cutting heads off (as they do) but making mistakes. We have the Government minister screwing a lap dancer plot line, a murky quasi government armaments board run by brain dead totty who you just know will fall for the hero. How many times have we had this plot? At 9.30 I said to my partner that I bet they knock off one of the characters as a warning. Right on que at the end they kill Nesbitt's wife. In the trailer for the next week he says it was done as a warning to him. So why not plug him and the series? Dreadful