No oversexed Keeley, but is The Capture this year’s Bodyguard?
FOR old-fashioned coppers like Inspector Morse, snaring crooks involved a pie and a pint in the local snug while he mulled over the suspects and evidence. The closest thing to sophisticated technology was the fruit machine. But now, as the hypertech thriller The Capture revealed, police munch on fried chicken and sip cappuccinos while they sit in front of multiple video screens.
Sometimes surveillance may even involve breakfast brioche. One senior officer refuses to start work until a junior brings him this toasted snack.
And if you don’t know what a breakfast brioche is, then you’ve clearly been left behind by the spy camera technology of 21st century counter-terrorism.
Today’s electronic marriage of highdefinition CCTV and advanced computer facial recognition software is almost as effective at detective work as this combination of French toast, maple syrup and bacon. Pie and a pint? That’s policing in the dark ages, guv.
But ultra-smart tech has drawbacks. The Capture, starring Holliday Grainger as a detective inspector on the Met fast track, challenges us to decide if we will ever be able to trust our own eyes when video footage can be so deceptive.
It did this in one brilliant courtroom sequence, showing us the evidence and then dismantling it with a single twist.
Callum Turner played British soldier Shaun Emery, imprisoned for an alleged war crime in Afghanistan.
Video and sound recording from a comrade’s bodycam appeared to show Emery shooting a wounded prisoner on the battlefield and then yelling at his mate to stay back.
The plot must surely have been based in part on Sergeant Alexander Blackman, or ‘Marine A’, who was jailed for killing an injured Taliban insurgent in 2011.
Blackman was freed after the Mail led a national campaign. Emery got out of jail much more easily, on the testimony of a video technician. It was a brilliant cameo by Paul Ritter as a supercilious braggart who thinks he’s
twice as clever as anyone else. We watched the video of Emery killing the prisoner over and over. The evidence of our eyes seemed irrefutable. Then the sneering boffin showed us that the audio and visuals were mismatched due to an electronic lag.
When the sound was properly aligned, it became obvious Emery acted in self-defence. After that, it was impossible to trust any video footage... even film that seemed to show Emery hours later assaulting his barrister, played by Laura Haddock, at a bus stop and dragging her away by the hair.
It’s all about interpretation, emphasised by the opening scene in which Sharon Rooney as a security guard gazed idly at CCTV monitors until she is transfixed by one screen. We don’t know what she’s seeing but it intrigues, then moves and finally horrifies her. The reaction shot, where unseen drama is reflected in a face, was a favourite of Alfred Hitchcock and writer and director Ben Chanan used it powerfully here.
The technique set up a clever twist too as we weren’t quite sure what Rooney’s character thought she had seen until a heavily armed police squad swooped on Emery’s house as he slept. The BBC has promoted this as the successor to Bodyguard. It’s subtler, slower and much less starry, devoid of suicide bombers and sheets of flame, let alone Keeley Hawes as an oversexed Home Secretary.
But it promises to be equally gripping. And it’s reassuring to know that this tech doesn’t work properly unless the operator gets a coffee and breakfast brioche.
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