Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Marc Warren, Maimie McCoy, Luke Allen-Gale, Elliot Barnes-Worrell, Darrell D’Silva, Emma Fielding, Christine Cole, Tom York, Saman Amini, Claire Bender, Marieke Heebink, Maarten Heijmans, Britte Lagcher, Mike Libanon, Tom Mothersdale, Shaniqua Okwok, Sander Plukaard, Arthur Roffelson, Peter van Heeringen, Wendy Vrijenhoek, Jennifer Welts, Bram Blankestijn, Joop Kasteel, Christian Petersson, Fruzina Nagy, Frieda Barnhard.
Corruption, on any scale, is an anathema that blights society and yet the world it seems cannot get by without it, without embracing the feel of the tentacle which adds to exploitation, bribery, vice and fraud, the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine“, which doesn’t do anything to enhance humanity but instead creates division, hatred and brings the possibility of murder to the streets of every city, town and village; a story which binds treachery and society in a way that arguably nothing else can come close to matching.
Murder, the falseness of jealousy and the seizing of revenge are entwined into any detective story which wishes to bring the element of suspense and possibility of a hero’s death right to the door of the reader or viewer who wishes to see an additional sense of brutality brought to their attention, how the seemingly straight-laced would face their own nemesis without some sort of advantage.
Death in Amsterdam, the third and final episode of the newly imagined series featuring the discerning Dutch detective, Van der Valk, with Marc Warren in the title role, makes great play of this sense of how lies and deceit can spin out of control, can bring a former respectable man to the point of seeing the world as their own dominion, their plaything, in which the rules that govern society, no longer apply to them.
The two investigations that inhabit the final episode, could quite easily been spread over two enquiries, a case of two stories making a whole because they possibly could not spin either one out into two complete, separate, stories. It is a shame that the idea of a murder within the ethical fashion industry could not be given a further injection of pace, of enough care to see it given its own dynamic ending, without having a case that bore no relation to other, one in which Van der Valk’s life was placed in danger by the son of a former colleague who wanted to exact revenge on the gruff detective. By putting the two different threads together, the makers of the series effectively arbitrarily decided to condition the response of the viewer, to bring a kind of dissonance, a schism to which made the story clunky and forced.
The exploration of Van der Valk’s character in this reimagining of the series is by no means one that has sat well, and whilst Marc Warren always commands the screen in the role, Death in Amsterdam does not do him the kind of favour that had been afforded to detectives such as Morse, Poirot and Tennison; his abruptness and dismissiveness reflecting upon the series as a whole.
Whilst any series which brings the best out of the armchair detective is to be applauded, there also has to be cohesion, a reason for the corruption in society which makes sense, which sees a character stand above those who see the chance to see that society burn.
Ian D. Hall