Falcon

Falcon -- Nordic noir, specifically "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," exerts a heavy, and malign influence on this BBC crime series. Set in Seville, Spain, the show features British actors applying their Cockney accents and North country brogue to simulate various Spanish coppers and thugs. The effect is disconcerting at first, but the peculiar mishmash of British diction and radiant Spanish light is the least of the series' problems. Seville looks picturesque in sweeping aerial shots, but most of the episodes involve grisly crimes committed in glaring close-up, desolate alleyways and industrial wastelands that could be anywhere in the developed world. Falcon, the titular detective, is dark, broodingly handsome bloke, his name tarted-up with some diacritical marks. The son of a Picasso-like artist -- his deceased father was a genius and sacred monster -- Falcon has a snotty ex-wife engaged to an unctuous and corrupt local "judge," apparently a sort of judicial officer entrusted with investigating serious crimes. The "judge," a sleek mannequin, typically thwarts Falcon, not only personally but professionally. Falcon is badly damaged goods -- he has a Gothic backstory involving the inadvertent murder by poisoning of his own mother, and his actual father turns out to someone other than the Picasso-surrogate. He sulks throughout each episode, periodically receiving beatings that inflict gruesomely depicted wounds on his face and body. The stories are absurdly complicated and involve elaborate government cover-ups and much mayhem. The show is particularly found of plots that involve eyes being gouged-out in lurid close-up, elaborate forms of torture and child-abuse in all varieties including graphically described sodomy. If a copper retires in this show, five minutes later he's committing suicide, a swan-dive off a high building and, then, a clinical shot of the corpse's mouth spewing blood onto the camera. Nothing makes any sense and the motivations of the characters are completely murky and impenetrable. The effect is that of seeing people doing ghastly things to one another without the vaguest notion of why they are behaving so badly. The women in the show are luscious, Bond-girls offering themselves for Falcon's dalliance, although he is generally too morose to do much of anything but sulk. The concept is perverse -- translate Nordic noir plots involving Fascist pedophile mastermind-criminals to sunny Seville. It's wholly humorless. This stuff wasn't all that involving in Sweden and transposing this sordid melodrama to a tourist destination presumably popular wth Brits doesn't improve the material.