July 23, 2002

Alias a killer thriller by any other name

The bad news is that the fever-pitched 24 has disappeared from Monday nights but the good news is that Alias (TV3, 8.30pm), its replacement, is a killer thriller.

by Jane Bowron

Sidney [sic] (Jennifer Garner) is a graduate who signed up to work as a covert CIA agent while at college to help pay off the student loan. We first set clappers on the beautiful agent when she appears tied to a chair, being interrogated.

With her cochineal-pink hair and limp doll-like appearance, Sidney resembles the acrobatic tumbling girl from Blade Runner and she certainly has the body and the moves to show she's earning every acting cent. She is proficient in the obligatory kung fu kick, impressive at Spider-Man wall-scaling, and generally makes Xena Warrior Princess look like an amateur.

You can tell she's doing her fair share of the fight scenes from her athletic build. In fact she is so worked out that when you see her dressed in your standard knockout Lady in Red halter-necked evening gown, one finds oneself asking, is-she-or-is-she-not a drag queen? Tall, big shouldered and square jawed, she's Julia Roberts without the oppressive capped china and crippling self-regard.

The first scene is so hammy-looking with an evil bespectacled Asian torturing a pretty Westerner that you want to reach for the remote and give it the flick. Don't. Not since The Man from Uncle has television delivered up such an entertaining show about agents, double agents and gosh could that possibly be a triple agent? Alias is like John Le Carre meets Maxwell Smart with lots of Bond gadgetry - a lipstick that takes photos and gives GPS and a lighter that stuffs up computers, videos and DVDs.

Sidney has a cold and remote father, her mother is dead but she is madly in love with Danny, a foppish English quack whose marriage proposal to her - singing in the quad on bended knee - signals thankfully that he is not long for this world.

A happily married spy just doesn't cut it so Danny is terminated to ensure that Sidney is alone again, naturally. Now that she has nothing left to lose - she actually says that line while the evil Asians are removing her back molars - she is much more interesting.

When she finds out that her employers killed her fiance, when she discovers that she's working for the same firm as dear old dad, when dear old Dad tells her she's actually working for the enemy - the Alliance of 12 - and that her name is actually Laila Harre (kidding) we see the real stuff of the spy emerging. Unable to countenance that she is working against Uncle Sam, Sidney goes directly to the CIA and rings up the head shirang with the message that there's a "walk-in" downstairs.

Looking like a cat walk theme model from London Fashion Week (possibly one of Viviene Westwood's) the loneliest girl in town makes a written statement and it's up to the incredibly fresh-faced handsome official in a nice well-lit office as opposed to the gloomy basement chic interior back at Alliance 12, to decide whether or not she can come in from the cold.

OK, so it's a lot of rubbish, but I far prefer it to The Street, which also started last night on TV One at 9.30pm. Even though this show stars the very talented, Oscar-winning Jennifer Connelly, its endless prattle of stock trader parlance and smug twentysomethings pushing buttons and yelling into phones is a giant bore.

The proffered insight into a rollercoaster day at the trader races is so 80s it is just annoying. There is a particularly loathsome character, Freddie, who gets his jollies from saying sexually shocking statements in crowded lifts and banging on about feminist plots he thinks will put his beloved pecker out of work. So he's supposed to be an "a-hole" (as he calls everybody), but he's a boring a-hole with unfunny lines delivered by a very bad actor. One wonders what lovely Jennifer Connelly was thinking of when she signed up for the show. The Dow Jones, I expect.

© STUFF

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