Liaison

A rather delicious thriller. ... In the intricacy of its storytelling "Liaison" does require our undivided attention, which is not an obstacle as regards Ms. Green and Mr. Cassel: They are hardly lusty teenagers, but they generate considerable heat.

Liaison doesn’t quite earn the right to take itself so seriously, and doesn’t quite honor its commitment to the global scope of its narrative. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot here to be admired, but the best elements are sabotaged by a certain laziness in writing.

Sadly, the writing here by Virginie Brac feels routine and uninspired, going through the espionage motions that push the characters down tracks that give them nothing interesting to do while they’re traveling to their destinations.

[Vincent Cassel and Eva Green] sail through these six episodes with the laidback efficiency we’ve come to expect from such professionals. The real problem is everything around them, serving a tired spycraft story that lumbers from trope to trope, even as it tries to spice things up with more contemporary nuances.

There’s perhaps a decent feature film to be found in Liaison, but reveals that might have felt a bit anticlimactic at 100 minutes feel irredeemably disappointing at six hour-long episodes.

The material merely regurgitates tattered genre clichés. ... It’s difficult to imagine what the appeal of Liaison might be, save for seeing how thoroughly a television series can waste fine performers like Cassel, Green and Mullan.

Overall, Liaison is entertaining in a way that a ride can be: all experience, little substance.