Amazon.com video review:
This three-tape set captures a police force
totally unlike the ones U.S. television and film audiences regularly
see. Gone are the gunshots and widespread violence that afflict
characters on NYPD Blue and Homicide. This dark British
miniseries has an unflinching focus on the pensive, slightly spooked
but always confident Detective Inspector Dave Creegan (Robson
Green). Of course the caseload isn't entirely alien to a pop culture
audience, weaned as it is on crime novels and American
television-style plots. There's an aging geneticist who is possessed
by an odd infatuation--apparently not a sexual one--with children,
keeping them penned in an all-white room while watching them on a
remote video cam, and other deviants just interesting enough to
capture extended interest. Touching Evil's pacing is
intricately slow, such that evidence gathering can be seen from an
inchworm-like perspective (showing tweezers extracting a single hair,
for example). Green's role is structured like Fox Mulder and other
U.S. television creations. Moody and a bit inscrutable, Creegan comes
to the Organized and Serial Crime Unit after a long sabbatical,
triggered (no pun, really!) by his getting shot in the head. Rather
than give up police work after meeting with the bullet, however, he
recommits to the job, treating cases as if they're his personal
obsession. And they are. Creegan violates all the conventions his
American TV-cop counterparts break in their unbridled passion to solve
crimes, but he does it with unforced and unhurried relish. The plots
in each of these episodes are singular, allowing the story lines to
develop like good mysteries, even driving the viewer to suspect that
Creegan's passions are leading him waywardly away from the cases. Shot
with mostly stoic camera angles, the show's energy changes
significantly when Creegan's heart begins to pound, the camera
catches in halted visuals, and the drama builds and builds until,
well, until it avoids resolution time and again, much to the viewer's
delight. --Andrew Bartlett
