Who is Erin Carter? has action scenes galore, a butt-kicking woman lead, and a couple of women directors. Sounds perfect, but it was merely average or slightly above for the genre. It had its good points. One was the setting in Spain which was gorgeous. The other was the performance by Evin Ahmad in the lead role.
Who is Erin Carter? introduces us first to a young woman, an English cop. She’s played by Evin Ahmad. Evin Ahmad is a Swedish actor of Kurdish origin. That’s not a sentence you get to type very often.
She got in hot water with the police for slamming one of her asshole co-workers into a locker door face first. Then D.I. Jim Armstrong (Jamie Bamber) recruited her for an undercover job. In choosing her name while undercover, the woman looked at Erin Carter but settled on Kate Jones.
While undercover as Kate Jones, she befriends another member of the gang she’s investigating, Lena (Denise Gough). Lena had a 5 year old daughter named Harper. Kate bonds with little Harper. (During most of the story, which takes place several years later, Harper is played by Indica Watson.)
The undercover operation goes bad, people are left bleeding and dead all over the place. Kate takes Harper and sneaks away to Spain.
Fast forward a few years and the woman, who now calls herself Erin Carter, is in Barcelona with her daughter Harper. They enter the supermarket during a robbery. Erin kills one of the robbers and recognizes the one who got away, who also recognizes her. They were in the gang she infiltrated back in England.
She’s now a local hero. Her photo is in the newspaper, which gets seen by people in England who want her dead.
Erin and her husband Jordi (Sean Teale) live next door to a Barcelona cop, Emilio (Pep Ambròs). Emilio sees the footage from the supermarket and realizes Erin is a lot more than the substitute teacher she claims to be.
Emilio forces her to do something illegal for him. All this happens in the first two episodes. The situation goes from bad to worse for Erin and her family after that and sets up the remaining 5 episodes of the series for the action packed thrill ride making up the majority of the story.
Every kind of bad character and every sort of danger beset Erin and her family for the remainder of the series. The action scenes were well done, the quiet moments were realistic and human. The overblown part of the story was the way people got shot or fell off a roof or slammed in the head with a blunt object and got up to keep on fighting. Especially the unstoppable Erin. She could take any kind of beating and keep fighting to protect Harper.
A mother’s love was the key thematic throughline in the story. It applied to Erin’s own childhood, her love for Harper, and to Harper’s birth mother.
The setting in Spain was sunny and bright. Colors were vivid. It was an interesting contrast to the deadly deeds of the various characters who all wanted something from Erin.
Evin Ahmad has appeared in many things, including The Rain in Danish and Quicksand in Swedish. Here she speaks mostly English. She was a strong leading character in this drama. I’m glad she got the opportunity to show she was capable of lead roles.
The women directors include Ashley Way and Sabina Dellicour. The series is streaming on Netflix. Have you seen it? What did you think of it?
Are you being paid to write such favorable reviews?
Ahmad is good at the role of Erin?
This is a shit show with shitty characters, and the only thing worse is that the actors are terrible even at portraying them.
Action scenes are not believable and are a big joke. Being shot in the stomach, losing pints of blood, and continuing as nothing has happened. Wow! Amazing acting skills 🙁
None of the actors are portraying anyone that is slightly relateable, and you end up not caring if Erin or ‘her’ daughter lives. I actually wanted Erin to die, this would have been a better ending and might leave you thinking and not disgusted by it.
0 stars. 0 talent. 0 story.
Total of 0 stars out of 10000000!
So which action thrillers *are* realistic, exactly? Perhaps the ones with male lead characters?
i enjoyed the series though i agree with the other commenter that the lead character made some choices and said some things that didnt seem consistent with who we are supposed to think she is. i had the sense, despite it appearing that the dialogue wasnt dubbed, that this was a foreign production; the characters seemed written the way someone not an English speaker might think English folks might speak.
that said, i agree with you Virginia that this series didnt have much action that was any more unbelievable than most other action movies. even the Bond and Mission Impossible series have some scenes that make me scratch my head in wonder. i mean, if there wasnt action that we dont see in the real world, why would anyone want to see these movies? (the same can be said of legal and medical shows).
I appreciate your comment, as always.