More ‘Stolen’ Reviews

Excerpts from a few reviews below. Warning: The Guardian review contains spoilers regarding a character’s death.

The Guardian

Also very good was Stolen (BBC1, Sunday), Stephen Butchard’s gritty thriller about child trafficking, with a strong performance by Damian Lewis as the well-meaning but ineffective DI Carter trying to stand up alone against a tide of international slavery. The child actors were excellent too – the young girl who plays Rosemary, a picture of shyness and terror, and the boy who is Georgie, the sweet lad from eastern Europe.

From The Independent

Stolen, BBC1’s one-off child-trafficking thriller, was a project worthy of Lewis’s talents. Written by Stephen Butchard (House of Saddam, Five Daughters) and directed by Justin Chadwick (Bleak House), it had impeccable provenance and, sure enough, even the title sequence squeaked with quality: lovingly composed photography, gorgeously bleak production design. Thanks, too, to some judicious editing, we were introduced within minutes to each of the wretched protagonists: Rosemary, a young girl fresh off the plane from Lagos on her way to domestic slavery; Georgie, an androgynous tyke condemned to clean up after the workers in a sandwich factory, and for no reward; and Kim Pak, a Vietnamese teen dreaming of escape from his gangmaster’s suburban marijuana farm.

From the Herald.ie

I WAS about to say there was an awful lot to enjoy about Stolen, except “enjoy” is probably not the ideal word to use about a drama about the harrowing subject of child trafficking. So let’s go with “admire” instead.

There was an awful lot to admire about Stolen, not least Damian Lewis as policeman DI Anthony Carter. Lewis was excellent, imbuing a character that was essentially a blank sheet with a compassion, controlled anger and inner life that wasn’t always obvious in Stephen Butchard’s uneven script.