STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
June Clarke (Sally Lindsay) is a hard working carer, who's hoping to buy her own house, and help her daughter Hana (Taj Atwal) out. But then she falls prey to a telephone 'cold caller', who fleeces her of all her money. She runs into Des (Daniel Ryan), an old school friend, at a therapy group for victims of scams. He knows how to go about tracking down fraudsters, and together him and June discover the man behind her scamming is Kirk Wiley (Paul Higgins), a wealthy client of hers, setting her on a dangerous path.
In an age where most theft is increasingly done over the phone and online, the modern day phenomenon of the 'cold caller' is certainly ripe for dramatic license, with all of us often reminded to keep personal details safe and to be aware of suspicious sounding calls and e-mails. There are plenty of real life recollections of such events on numourous consumer watchdog programmes, and it certainly could have produced some emotive real life drama. Instead, we've got this ridiculously over the top suspense thriller.
Despite a promising opening, with Lindsay well cast in the lead role, it descends into a nonsensically far fetched affair, deviating from any sort of believable real life sequence of events, into a crazy scenario involving gangsters and some mysterious old man, like in one of those old spy thrillers. By the end, June's gone from being an ordinary, everyday person, to someone who's taken a life without any sort of trauma, and then happily flies off on a holiday, and with a real life lead character that unbelievable, how can you take to anything else?
I'm not sure what the makers of this had in mind, or the direction they were trying to take it in, but it's a wasted chance to shine a light on something that affects many people today. **
June Clarke (Sally Lindsay) is a hard working carer, who's hoping to buy her own house, and help her daughter Hana (Taj Atwal) out. But then she falls prey to a telephone 'cold caller', who fleeces her of all her money. She runs into Des (Daniel Ryan), an old school friend, at a therapy group for victims of scams. He knows how to go about tracking down fraudsters, and together him and June discover the man behind her scamming is Kirk Wiley (Paul Higgins), a wealthy client of hers, setting her on a dangerous path.
In an age where most theft is increasingly done over the phone and online, the modern day phenomenon of the 'cold caller' is certainly ripe for dramatic license, with all of us often reminded to keep personal details safe and to be aware of suspicious sounding calls and e-mails. There are plenty of real life recollections of such events on numourous consumer watchdog programmes, and it certainly could have produced some emotive real life drama. Instead, we've got this ridiculously over the top suspense thriller.
Despite a promising opening, with Lindsay well cast in the lead role, it descends into a nonsensically far fetched affair, deviating from any sort of believable real life sequence of events, into a crazy scenario involving gangsters and some mysterious old man, like in one of those old spy thrillers. By the end, June's gone from being an ordinary, everyday person, to someone who's taken a life without any sort of trauma, and then happily flies off on a holiday, and with a real life lead character that unbelievable, how can you take to anything else?
I'm not sure what the makers of this had in mind, or the direction they were trying to take it in, but it's a wasted chance to shine a light on something that affects many people today. **