Sam Blake (Martin Kemp) is an MI6 sniper who was involved in a botched assignment in Spain headed up by an overzealous team lead, Weybridge (Phil Davis), causing an innocent man to lose his life and the entire team to be sidelined. Blake spends his time now in the company of a number of lady friends, as well as spending quality time with his teen daughter, Joss (Dani Dyer). When he gets an odd phone call from a distorted voice calling himself Jericho, he thinks nothing of it and hangs up, only to have his girlfriend shot as she is leaving his place. When Jericho calls back, Blake takes him more seriously. He informs Blake that he needs him to kill six people of Jericho's choosing, on the hour every hour for the next six hours, and if not, dire consequences will follow. When Blake realizes Jericho has his daughter, he begrudgingly races out to comply.
Meanwhile, somewhere else in London, an private escort named Lexi (April Pearson) is also being ordered around by Jericho, as her uncle has been taken by the terrorist. She is following some simple information-gathering tasks in the course of her normal work, but as Blake begins his wetwork, the two will cross paths at the behest of Jericho.
To make matters worse, there is an anti-Muslim rally brewing and set to occur later on that day led by The Patriot Alliance, whose head is Roy Dixon (Nick Moran), a seemingly somewhat sensible leader who is actually radicalizing the local white supremacy movement behind closed doors. Police are already out in force trying to keep the peace, but then Jericho and Blake begin their respective killing sprees and the police force is spinning in circles. The team lead is D.I. Hannah Siddiq (Anouska Mond), who honestly looks and acts way too young to be the team lead. As she and her lackeys go around town as the different murders occur, they just can't seem to get a handle on things... and then Scotland Yard steps in and takes over, treating it like a typical maniac on the loose, whereas Siddiq senses something different is at play.
Things get much more difficult for Blake when one of the murders he is forced to commit has witnesses and now his face is all over the news, so he and Lexi will have to work together and get creative if they expect to get out of this mess alive.
Honestly, the concept of the film is a decent one, and Martin Kemp is fairly believable as a terrified father simply trying to save his daughter in whatever way he can, but things get a bit muddy when it comes to the political ramifications of things and how everything actually plays out. You've got a terrorist having seemingly random people murdered across the city, one who is willing to shoot up a coffee shop if his murder-slave is a few minutes late killing a target, and yet somehow, none of the CCTV that permeates nearly every street corner of London picks him up doing this? What's more, Scotland Yard, the GCHQ, MI5, the Prime Minister and a handful of other bigwigs are all involved somehow, but personally, the specifics of why got a bit muddled for me by the end. Sure, I got the main thrust of it, and I think the filmmakers might have been hoping to make this a series of films based on a scene at the end, but it just was less than I'd hoped.
While not terrible, it's not a great movie, by any means. The action is not bad and only a few of the actors were really hard to believe, like D.I. Siddiq, who occasionally said some intelligent things, but was just hard to buy in the role. Also, Lexi the prostitute should probably have taken off those spiked heels to sneak around, and been a bit quieter. Just sayin'. I did really like the intro screen credits montage, which was very stylish and James Bond-ish. Overall, if you can catch it on Netflix and you like kidnap flicks with high stakes, you may want to check it out. However, if you dislike anything politically-driven, pass on this one.
