Disney+ Suspect: Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes review

The Herald Scotland

29-04-2025

Alison Rowat
***
July 7, 2005. A glorious summer's day. World leaders had gathered at Gleneagles for the G8 Summit, hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
A 'ring of steel' had been thrown around the site. But the real threat was 360 miles away in London, where suicide bombers were preparing to unleash carnage on a scale not seen since the Second World War.
First reports said a 'power surge' had knocked out the Tube. No one believed it. The summit was forgotten in favour of trying to get through to loved ones in London that day. Panic set in, but what was happening at Gleneagles was nothing compared to the sheer terror visited on London that day.
To watch the four-part Disney+ drama Suspect: the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, was to be taken back to that day.
Writer Jeff Pope began conventionally enough with the hours immediately after the bombs went off. We saw investigators sifting through a bombed carriage, the first meetings between the Metropolitan Police and ministers, the confusion on the ground, the sheer chaos.
It was 15 minutes, an age in screen time, before we were finally and briefly introduced to the drama's subject, Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician wrongly shot dead by police weeks later. It was a worrying sign that the drama lacked focus, and so it proved.
The first two hours were largely taken up with the stories of the bombers. But the point of this drama, or so it seemed, was to throw much-needed light on how police came to kill an innocent man, and how they responded when taken to task for it. That lack of transparency and accountability, as is now known, did not end with Mr de Menezes.
Pope, the writer of Philomena and Little Boy Blue, has a real talent for combining the personal and political. Yet after four hours, I felt I knew little to nothing about Mr Menezes. He was an ordinary young guy to whom an extraordinarily dreadful thing happened. But surely there was more to say about him and his family than what was crammed into the drama's final acts.
In the end we learned more about senior police officers Cressida Dick, Brian Paddick and Ian Blair (played by Emily Mortimer, Russell Tovey, Conleth Hill) than we did about Mr de Menezes (Edison Alcaide).
Mortimer and co turn in reliably decent performances, with Sir Ian Blair coming across as a man with a gift for opening his mouth and putting both feet in. Dick seemed officialdom personified, refusing to say she did anything wrong. Paddick emerged as the best of the police bunch, the officer who tried to do the right thing but was frustrated at every turn.
To its credit, Pope's drama does at least press home the headline truths and lies about the shooting. Mr de Menezes did not leap the ticket barrier. He was not wearing a bulky jacket. He did not move towards police. And no warning was shouted. No matter the fear and confusion on the day, those are the facts.