Could someone please start an online petition to get Helen McCrory in more films? She was last seen as a Malfoy in the final couple of ‘Harry Potter’ films, which surely paid off a chunk of the mortage. But in this otherwise pretty average British drama she hits you between the eyes with her screen presence. She’s Frankie, an aeronautical engineer working on a top-secret fighter plane, with a Helen Mirren- ish, foxy-but-formidable attitude. She’s an alpha-female in a man’s world, slapping down a pair of top- brass MoD generals with a glint in her eye.
So far, so promising, but ‘Flying Blind’ quickly goes into erotic- thriller-by-numbers mode when Frankie meets Kahil (Najib Oudghiri), an Arab engineering student. Terrorist alarm bells start ringing because we’ve heard the word ‘drone’ dropped a few too many times for it to be a coincidence. And Kahil has some nasty looking scars on his chest. Is he hiding painful secrets or something more sinister? As drama, it’s thin and unconvincing, but still, more McCrory please.