You know what they say. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the drug smuggling across the Sahara racket. Alas, these are wise words that young cartel driver Max (Alfie Allen, bringing exactly the reckless high energy the character and venture require) has failed to heed. We first meet him speeding across the Algerian portion of the north African desert with a companion called Carlos (Nezar Thalal) on their way to Beirut to exchange a great deal of cocaine for some antique statues, when bish, bash, wallop, what’s happening?! An ambush by a militant group armed with machine guns who kill Carlos and are about to kill Max? But then one of the group turns on the others and kills all of them stone dead instead, before flinging Max and the coke in the car and hightailing it out of there? That is what’s happening! Goodness me and welcome to the first 37 seconds of Atomic, a five-part miniseries you shouldn’t expect to let up any time soon.
Max’s rescuer is averse to providing his real name so Max calls him JJ – short for “Jihadi John”. If this offends anyone’s delicate sensibilities I think you should have left 37 seconds ago. JJ reroutes them to Benghazi for unspecified reasons. Max can hope to return to his original plans thereafter.
Meanwhile, we trot over to other parts of the globe, including the Caucasus mountains in Russia, where an oligarch’s fearsome daughter Oksana Shirokova (Avital Lvova) is sending a brace of boxes via some reluctant mule herders to Beirut. She adds that they and the unspecified contents (“To you they’re statues”) being smuggled out of the nuclear state must be kept two metres apart at all times. The mule herders look even more reluctant. The astute viewer notes anew the title of the series and nods sagely.
For the first episode or two you worry that it’s all going to be too much. To the multiple locations and destinations, potential heroes and villains are added a cartel riad in Marrakech, flashbacks to JJ in Syria, an American university in Beirut where Samira Wiley is Dr Cassie Elliott, an unusually well-armed lecturer in physics, a set of corrupt gendarmes, a gang of military types led by a very angry Scotsman, Rab Makintosh (Stuart Martin), the father of one of the murdered militants, a lost young boy (Keni Emmanuelle, heartbreaking in a wordless part), the CIA, and Max’s beloved girlfriend Laetitia (Charlie Murphy) and Brian Gleeson as Dr Elliott’s boss, Mark, and a few more.
Fortunately, just as you are starting to feel that if there is one more piece of information thrown at you it is going to push the entire mass out of your head, the flood of new things stops and the plot starts to tighten and deepen.
JJ’s mysterious backstory is filled in and his motives are complicated at every turn. Banter with Max gradually gives way to bonding as the pair realise they are caught up in no ordinary cartel deal with no ordinary cargo at its heart. The suspense never lets up as they are pursued across numerous territories in a variety of vehicles and with a variety of weapons trained on them, sometimes by those with personal grudges against them, sometimes by those who merely want to murder them for their increasingly grubby rucksacks and the volatile things inside them (uranium, OK? It’s uranium. I don’t know why I’m trying so hard to keep it a secret), but the increasing emotional stakes are raised as we go.
The violence is frequent but – especially for all those who are still in the process of recovering from the harrowing, seemingly endless scenes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North – mercifully cartoonish. The questions that it asks about what it means to live a good life, how people pervert religions, seek redemption or justify taking revenge come increasingly to the fore and add an unexpected heft to the whole, though it can still be enjoyed as a breakneck, Guy-Ritchie-esque drug-caper-cum-buddy-movie, if you want.
But Atomic brings with it that ineffable pleasure caused by watching something that someone took just one or two extra passes over, to give its audience an experience just a bit better than you were expecting, just that bit better than it needed to be.