Code 404 Season One (2020) Review
Detective Inspectors DI John Major (Daniel Mays) and DI Roy Carver (Stephen Graham) are the top crime fighting duo in the Met’s Special Investigation Unit, but when an undercover sting goes horribly wrong, Major is gunned down on the job and killed. How will the SIU function without him? Well, it doesn’t have to.
As an ‘asset’ considered too valuable to lose, his body is fast-tracked into an experimental Artificial Intelligence project to bring him back from the dead. The only problem is, Major 2.0 may look like and sound like the original, but something has been lost in translation – quite a lot actually. His arrogant demeanour and gung-ho approach remain, but his crime fighting instincts have completely deserted him.
Fast, frisky and energetic CODE 404 is definitely more comedy than sci-fi so anyone approaching this thinking that they’ll get a spoof version of ROBOCOP, UPGRADE or even THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, despite sharing some of the same DNA, will be disappointed. This is simply and purely broad comedy that just happens to have a wee bit of sci-fi in the mix, not the other way round.
Stephen Graham plays the straight-man to Daniel Mays daft copper John Major. In fact John Major is so bumbling and inept that spending onscreen company with him can occasionally grate on the nerves. Mays appears to be channelling the late Mel Smith, by way of POLICE SQUAD’s Frank Drebin, in terms of his comedic approach, which is okay for fans of Mel Smith but less so for those amongst us left cold by that particular brand of humour.
If we had more time with Major before he was rebuilt then perhaps seeing his later incompetence would have been funnier. However because we spend so little time getting to know Major prior to his demise you are left thinking that he’s always been a bit of a dick and consequently end up wondering why they brought him back from the dead to start with, rather than the top-cop he was meant to have been.
With each of the season’s six episodes weighting at around twenty-two minutes per episode CODE 404 is certainly brisk but it also slight on plot. That’s not a criticism as it offers a welcome relief during our current unprecedented and chaotic times. For the most part this works a treat however it’s unfortunate that the main character is ultimately, and ironically, the one part that fails to work properly.