This is an utterly fantastic and gripping, yet tragically real-life story of what happened to Danielle Cable and her fiancé Stephen Cameron in a so-called road-rage incident, at Junction 3 of the M25 (at the Swanley/M20 interchange), about 15 miles south-east of London, in 1996. The story was a sensation in the national media for many weeks and the incident seemed to be symptomatic of the rising violence in society. However, it wasn't all it seemed at first.
Not long into this film you realize that it's also concerned with far more sinister matters, namely the insidious presence (or absense, in Spain, as it turns out) of the evil Kenneth Noye, sadistic real-life master-criminal of Britain, formerly acquitted of the charge of murdering a trespasser in the garden of his Sevenoaks home in 1985 (it was really an undercover policeman). Strangely, that earlier incident reminds me of the infamous Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who murdered an intruder in 1999.
This brilliant Adrian Shergold film has all of the classic iconography of London/South East crime and gangsterism - the fake identity Land Rover car; the epic and foreboding Dartford Bridge on the skyline and the badlands around the estuary; the M25 orbital motorway; and the ugly, crude Kent and London accent (probably the worst and most vile in Britain). The film is similar in some ways to Essex Boys - the real-life story of drug killings north of the river - which also featured a Land Rover and, indeed, criminals that were directly connected by funding to Kenneth Noye, who was probably on his way to Essex when the murder in this film took place. Who knows?
The film has some great police detection work and features the quest to identify and arrest Noye. Joanne Frogatt is absolutey sensational as the traumatized, young yet stern Danielle Cable who witnessed everything but wants justice. She later has to go under the auspices of the police witness protection progamme with accompanying relocation, hair-dying and stuff, what one can only imagine must be a shattering experience, particularly at such a young age (21). Ironically, however, the actress Frogatt has an uncanny real-life resemblance to the former Danielle Cable.
Not long into this film you realize that it's also concerned with far more sinister matters, namely the insidious presence (or absense, in Spain, as it turns out) of the evil Kenneth Noye, sadistic real-life master-criminal of Britain, formerly acquitted of the charge of murdering a trespasser in the garden of his Sevenoaks home in 1985 (it was really an undercover policeman). Strangely, that earlier incident reminds me of the infamous Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who murdered an intruder in 1999.
This brilliant Adrian Shergold film has all of the classic iconography of London/South East crime and gangsterism - the fake identity Land Rover car; the epic and foreboding Dartford Bridge on the skyline and the badlands around the estuary; the M25 orbital motorway; and the ugly, crude Kent and London accent (probably the worst and most vile in Britain). The film is similar in some ways to Essex Boys - the real-life story of drug killings north of the river - which also featured a Land Rover and, indeed, criminals that were directly connected by funding to Kenneth Noye, who was probably on his way to Essex when the murder in this film took place. Who knows?
The film has some great police detection work and features the quest to identify and arrest Noye. Joanne Frogatt is absolutey sensational as the traumatized, young yet stern Danielle Cable who witnessed everything but wants justice. She later has to go under the auspices of the police witness protection progamme with accompanying relocation, hair-dying and stuff, what one can only imagine must be a shattering experience, particularly at such a young age (21). Ironically, however, the actress Frogatt has an uncanny real-life resemblance to the former Danielle Cable.
