The Wrong Mans

The Wrong Mans review

The Wrong Mans blends workplace comedy and Hitchcockian thrillers-and does both well.

Finale review: The Wrong Mans

I think The Wrong Mans can largely be considered a big success.

The final part of Mathew Baynton and James Corden's action-movie-spoof-com begins with the fugitive pair backed into a corner, an unlikely Hollywood plot device their only hope of escape. But escape they do, just as they grasp that the (not entirely intelligible) plot they're caught up in is linked to Berkshire Country Council, the boys' hitherto dullsville workplace. The friction between comedy and thriller has produced sparks of brilliance in this series, mainly in the magnificent incongruity of Corden's lovable loser Phil.

Our accidental all-action spy heroes Sam and Phil leap into some high-octane Bond-age scrapes tonight as, all too soon, we reach the end of the road for this excellent dramatic comedy.

It's been a deft mesh of the familiar concerns of everyday life with the preposterously epic, played with utter conviction by James Corden and Mathew Baynton.

But before the punchy final showdown, the pair have to get themselves out of their tricky Thelma & Louise-style cliffhanger...

Congratulations to James Corden and Mat Baynton for inventing a whole new TV genre, the thriller-com.

At the end of last week's episode their hapless duo Sam and Phil were surrounded by heavily armed MI6 agents on the ground and in the air.

Their escape looked impossible - and after tonight's opening you might still not be convinced as to how they manage to elude capture for another half-hour.

No matter. The concluding triumph tonight has so much intense physical comedy it could be a workout video.

The final episode of Mat Baynton and James Corden's irresistible comedy thriller doesn't deliver what you hope it will. It goes much further than that. There's payoff after air-punching pay-off as the various threads of the story swiftly come together, with the sort of swagger you can't get away with unless you've been solidly entertaining for the previous five episodes.

But the increasingly heroic stooges Sam and Phil have been: chasing every red herring and unlikely plot twist just as we have, with their everyman meekness and uncertain friendship constantly threatening to spoil their efforts to do the right thing against the odds. As we rejoin the action, they merely have to escape from a circle of gun-toting special agents, before exposing a huge political conspiracy they can't prove exists. You wouldn't bet against them.

The Wrong Mans episode 6 review

Everything got wrapped up, all the loose ends got tied off, and there were even a few satisfying callbacks to the beginning of the story. Actually, it... kind of felt like the end of a film, didn't it?

Have you been watching ... The Wrong Mans?

Will James Corden and Mathew Baynton survive their wickedly funny crime caper involving Russian gangsters, MI5 and the Berkshire town planning office?

The high body count in this series, and the storyline's refusal to go back and rake over old ground, means there are great characters everywhere, barely known before being discarded at the side of the road. Following Nick Moran's small-time crook and Dougray Scott's surprisingly vulnerable spook, in this episode there's a bit more of Karel Roden excelling as Marat, the Russian gangster who is caught between his country's security services and ours.

Making him tender and childlike fits with the tone of a penultimate episode that's the most thrilling yet but also the most heartfelt, as we get to know Sam and Phil more deeply, just as they have to decide whether to risk everything to become heroes.

The laughs often come with a fist-pumping cheer not far behind: Mat Baynton's line at the end of a fantastic four-way punch-up with an FSB heavy could be a quotable highlight from an Edgar Wright movie.

The Wrong Mans episode 5 review

Here's where everything comes together, then. Amongst the plot-of-the-week developments and McGuffins, it turns out The Wrong Mans has been sowing the seeds of a much bigger plot.