Trapped: Season 2 (2019) Review
Trapped: Season 2 (2019) Review
In Trapped: Season Two, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson reprises his role as chief police inspector Andri, who investigates a complex and challenging murder case, alongside his investigating partners played by Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson.
Former local police chief, Andri Ólafsson has started a new life in Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik. As he tries to rebuild a shattered family at home, an attempt to assassinate a politician through self-immolation throws his work back into the deadly cat and mouse games he had been trying to escape.
Quickly learning that the attacker was the politician’s twin brother, his investigation leads him back to the same small town he had run from, and to his old partner. As he and Hinrika, now the town’s Sheriff, start putting the pieces together, they realise that the seeds of crime may have struck root higher up than they ever thought possible and as such the risk to them both, and their loved ones, has never been greater.
In 2016, Season One received the highest budget invested into an Icelandic series and premiered to 1.2 million viewers on BBC Four. Over the past three years it has been watched by 10 million people in the UK, Germany, France and Scandinavia and it was hailed by the Guardian newspaper hailed as “the sleeper hit of the winter.” As with Season One, Trapped: Season Two is under the direction of acclaimed filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur who helmed 2015’s true-story epic Everest. High expectations have been met with glistening reviews of Season Two.
Glistening reviews? It’s well-made for sure – the cast and the photography are both excellent – but it’s hardly anything more than yet another modern-day TV thriller that adheres stringently to the standard template. Trapped: Season 2 signposts plot developments – for example, it’s made very clear, early on, that chief police inspector Andri’s estranged relationship with his daughter will be crucial to the story and that she may be at risk at some point, why would we know this? Because too much is made too soon about the distance between them both emotionally so you just know that later on in the story the daughter will be in some danger and that her dad will come and save her and this will lead to reconciliation between them both. How is the stuff of ‘glistening’ reviews? It’s old-hat and obvious!
The script also aims to be ‘relevant’ to matters of our time by throwing in everything from homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and corporations destroying our environment amongst other threads. Again this is simply ticking boxes, it’s script-by-committee, chucking into the mix anything that the makers feel may generate headlines and effectively sell their product to a wider audience, after all, their cost outlay has been significant and needs to be recouped.
Rather depressingly it would appear that solid, generic entertainment has become the new benchmark for that which is perceived as being worthy of ‘glistening’ reviews. Here’s hoping that sometime soon someone will actually make something for the genre that IS genuinely good rather than as predictable, safe, by-the-numbers and as well-worn as Trapped’s Season 2 ultimately is.
