Didn’t care if anyone survived by the end…..

This brought to mind elements of Under Siege 2 and Team America but both were entertaining and the latter was intentional parody.

It’s fiction of course, and that’s what I signed up for, but shouldn’t it be at least subject to the unwritten rules of plausibility even for its genre? It starts out ok and you accept to an extent that some of the plot and dialogue will be as cliched as the heroes and villains.

As the main action developed I became increasingly distracted by the lack of realism. I listen to stories like this for distraction and escapism, so to be distracted from my distraction by poorly constructed scenes became annoying. For example, a man jumping onto a night train going over a third the speed of sound without injury left me wondering how little consideration for realism was going into the balance of the story.

There seemed little in the way of character development and even if it assumes you know the cast, there was not enough to reconnect me to characters from at least three connected stories I’ve listened to. In the end the implausibility of the unfolding action, the empty political characters and my conclusion that I didn’t care what happened to any of them had me stop and send it back.

I took stars from the narrator for making most of the English cast sound like caricatures from a century ago or Australians.

I enjoyed other stories from the series but this felt formulaic / rushed / lazy by comparison. If you’re fine having your action served up by one dimensional characters, without nuance or consideration for reality, this could be for you. Otherwise I would give it a miss.

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