I guess this is what they mean by “guilty pleasure.” As I watched the entire first season of the new series ‘In from the Cold’, I kept thinking to myself, “this is preposterous, no way could that happen – no way would it go like that!”
That was in the first episode.
And then I realized that if I was watching, for example, a Marvel comic movie instead, all of my thoughts and objections to realism would go away-wouldn’t even be a passing notion. And that’s when I was able to focus on the story, the gorgeous international setting, and most of all, the characters, who I came to love (or hate, as the plot required).
There are many twists, which I will not reveal in this spoiler-free review:
A New Jersey single mom accompanies her daughter to Madrid Spain for a major Ice Skating tournament, in which her daughter will compete. Freshly divorced and feeling good in her over forty self, Jenny (Margarita Levieva) is all set to enjoy her week in Spain with daughter Becca (Lydia Fleming).
But it doesn’t take long before she is nabbed and taken into custody by a CIA agent, Chauncey (Cillian O’Sullivan) and his technical wizard assistant, Chris (Charles Bruce).
Jenny, you see, was once a Russian spy as a very young lady. Ruthless and good at her job, but she wanted out and disappeared so completely that they called her The Whisper.
Now, Jenny has to decide whether to keep her secret and the identity she made for herself these past 20+ years by helping out Chauncey with, I’m just going to make it short here, a mission in Madrid that has huge international consequences.
Or will she refuse to get back in the game and have her true identity revealed to her family and, of course, the Russkies.
Guess what she decides to do?
Yep, she’s gonna spend the week trying to keep up her front with her daughter, while also spending hours when daughter doesn’t need her around (and as a teen, she doesn’t really want mom around) kicking asses of guys much bigger than she. And not just kicking asses in exciting fight sequences, but going undercover in risky situations that are fraught with tension, and taking a lot of body blows herself.
The bad guys are deliciously bad, and the baddest of them all is Svetlana (Alyonka Khmelntiskaya), Jenny’s handler/boss/coach back in Jenny’s younger days. The series flashes back and forth from present day Jenny to the young, beret-wearing Anya, as she was then known, played with charm and depth by Ivanna Sakhno.
The cast are great all around. It took me a while to warm up to the performance of Cillian O’ Sullivan as Chauncey, but the whole viewing experience rests on the shoulders of Margarita Levieva, and she is amazing.
I think it’s pretty great to have an action series with a nearly middle-aged woman as the smartest and the most physically capable of anyone onscreen. Levieva never made one false move.
Yeah, when it is revealed in episode 1 that Jenny has a kind of “special power” (science-based, thankfully) I didn’t know if I would be down for it. But it really is a crackerjack series- lots of fun, excitement, double-crosses, secrets revealed and a good watch throughout the 8 episodes.
In from the Cold streams on Netflix starting January 28th | 3 ½ out of 4 Stars|
