One of my all time favorites.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

From my favorite movies..

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The near 5-hour mini began well with dreamy, boozy overtones enveloping an awakening London The haze descends upon our 2 lovers and the origins of their chance meet, Alistair aiding the woefully hungover and besotted Danny, assembling the pieces from a rant-induced phone toss. Danny at the "I should be living better than this" realization, clouded with the sleazy memories of the night before, begging and pleading for normalcy and love. Alas the sizzled and liquid love eyes cast upon him from the stranger (or so he imagines). Fast forward past the 4 hours of subsequent drama (including Alistair's death, Danny's reconnect with his original sugar daddy played by the puffy Harry Potter demon Jim Broadbent, odd encounters with Danny's parents, laughing including a tracyotimied father, an bizarre rendezvous in a upper-high class private gay men's club, a cheap and gaudy geisha performer, wisdom from the straight and exotic female roommate, Boogie Nights-inspired scene with a gay crack cocaine addicted sadist, etc. etc.) Fast forward to the closing scene with Rampling and Danny driving off into the sunset and cue the laughter.

This is not a great series. It starts off with silly dialog, of which there's not a great deal, and continues to jump all over the place. Scenes seem to have no continuity, and the viewers suddenly find themselves moving from Point A to C, with no B in between. Things happen in the story without any real explanation of why they occur. You get that the guy is a spy, and therefore hiding secrets but what you don't get is a complete unfolding of the story in a logical manner with any continuity. The scenes just seem to be stuck together randomly, the dialog is all too pretentious, delivered in short bursts, interspersed with long periods of silence with a lot of staring between the characters. The cinematography seems to be shared with other European films, and there are many close-ups of mouths, ears, necks, eyes etc. The pace is so slow and boring in parts that it will put you to sleep. If one had to type the series, it would be characterized as a gay love story, and less about spying.

A late comment, but I actually did watch this series when it was new, and obsessively, repeating episodes multiple times - at first. Now I'm coming back to it and rewatching it on Netflix streaming. I thought it was going to have lost its magic but no, for all its flaws it's still compulsively watchable. Many of the things said here that are contradictory are also true. The writing is pretentious and overwrought, but it's also a haunting and entrancing story. Yes, it's utterly absurd the things that happen, but some of the most basic emotions out of which the story is built - the loneliness and need, the romantic affair - are very real and memorable. Perhaps the relationship between Danny and Scottie is a gay old man-young man cliché, but it's still touching and real. The gay spy theme runs up into dangerous clichés too, but still is highly original. And after all, despite the negative stereotypes some have pointed to, this is a spy story where the gayness is not just a weapon or a liability but simply central, a given, and in that regard, Whishaw as an out gay actor can be proud to have played such a marvelous role in it. Above and beyond any specifics of the story there is simply the fact of Danny as a complex, attractive character, basically a mess, and yet utterly sexy and sweet, the kind of gay young man an old dear like Scottie would be happy to love and protect. Edward Holcorft I'm uncomfortable about. The actor seems so stiff and affected. But that also fits the character of Alex perfectly well: the flaw is in the conception of Alex by the minds behind the series. Jim Broadbent is a consummate pro. But obviously it's Ben Whishaw who makes it all worthwhile and he's touching, real, and as the boyish gay young man, utterly adorable. My excessive fascination with the character of Danny that Ben plays is what kept me coming back over and over, but it was outmatched by my pleasure in Whishaw's authentic and appealing performance, which is one of the best I've seen him in, and he's always good. He's one of the best actors of his generation, some even think the best. There are more mercurial and astonishing ones like Tom Hardy. None so cuddly as Ben though. Sorry I didn't see him as Hamlet.Then Charlotte Rampling comes along and though it's one of her "standard" roles there's nothing standard about her, she's terrifyingly off-putting, in top form. The second, post-Alex phase investigating Alex is very good. In it, everything in the first phase is undercut and mystified, and this is good, through it seems more programmatic and more far-fetched than the first. It's the last phase where things go down the rabbit hole into sheer nonsense. And you cease to be invested in the story as you were early on. Perhaps you knew this was going to happen. But you liked the overwrought-ness, the camp, so much you accepted anything, and the acting and settings and cinematography were so classy, it was okay. Then it's just bonkers, and it's all more or less thrown away.Everything is totally stylized. Some of the editing I find annoying, like the jump cuts and paralleled lines of dialogue in the gay love sequence. It all becomes cloying, too-too. And yet, and yet, guilty pleasure though it may be, it's compulsively watchable. I do not know about the other work of the much talked about Tom Rob Smith. I know director Jakob Verbruggen has done other good things. But in "London Spy," the story eventually deteriorates into the preposterous so you don't care about it. Yet it's made its impression, for the excessive but compelling craftsmanship and the magical acting of Ben Whishaw. For all its flaws this weaves a magic spell and leaves a special memory.

The acting is good, but this is really not so much a spy thriller as a gay love story. If this is what you are looking for, you'll like it, including the gay sex scenes. The entertainment industry foists gratuitous sex, both hetero and homo on the viewing public. I, for one, will not watch. My previous review was deleted...for saying this? It seems NF has editors of reviews who aspire to their own agenda.