Ride or Die: Gal-pal action series is narrative comfort food

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By Liam Lacey

“I’m not a murderer, I’m an assassin. I kill really awful, terrible people,” explains Judith (Hannah Waddingham) to her longtime friend, Debbie (Octavia Spencer) in the new eight-part Prime Video series, Ride or Die.

As world leaders keep telling us these days, killing “awful, terrible people” is perfectly great. So, dispense with your precious ethical concerns and settle in for a modestly binge-able series, an action comedy with the novelty of starring two women in their fifties.

Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer are gal pals on a hit list in Ride or Die.

Think the distaff John Wick or James Bond, a more mature Thelma and Louise, a female version of the buddy action movies of the ‘80s and a case of doubling down on the trend toward middle-aged women in action roles (Michelle Yeoh, Viola Davis) as models of empowerment. Created by English comedian and writer Tessa Coates, the series is narrative comfort food, which rides on the rapport of its two stars, and almost dies in the tangles of its plot, stretching what could have been a zippy two-hour movie into eight distended episodes.

Waddingham’s career break-through was her Emmy-winning role in the Apple TV sports comedy Ted Lasso. She has said the role was one of the first times she was not type cast as a “tall, bigger woman” though clearly her height (5’11” before heels) and Junoesque physique is central to her character of the imposing team owner, Rebecca Welton. 

Here, she plays a blond Glamazon, who operates in the conspicuous mode of James Bond, showing up at the watering holes of the jet set and leaving bodies and rubble in her wake. Like Bond, she is happy to mix pleasure and business. In the series’ opening scene, we see her at an Austrian ski resort, where she deftly takes out a target, and escapes the panicky crowd by jumping on skis to make her escape.

Afterward, she goes dancing and drinking at a club and picks up a handsome bartender for the night. In the morning, she hops out of the window and makes her escape without a kiss goodbye.

Judith’s cover, when back in London, is as a “forensic accountant”, a profession so complicated and boring-sounding that no one ever asks her what she actually does. That includes her best friend of a couple of decades, Debbie (Octavia Spencer), a lawyer and the American-born wife and brains behind the career of a buffoonish English politician (Jamie Parker) on track to become Prime Minister.

Judith’s secret life becomes entangled with Debbie’s at a party, when one of Judith’s hits goes wrong. In the bloody aftermath, Judith and Debbie find themselves fleeing across Europe (the many cities of which are actually shot in the Czech Republic) being chased by various people.

Debbie is the target of Albanian mobsters and an Interpol agent, relating to her husband’s corrupt schemes. Spencer, a three-time Academy Award nominee (The Help, Hidden Figures, The Shape of Water) is the emotional anchor in the film, a woman struggling with the betrayals by both her husband and secrets of her best friend. 

While she has moments of vulnerability, Waddingham’s character’s major function is to get beaten up frequently and then retaliate in style. Her pursuers include her agency’s chilly director (Bill Nighy) in league with a psychopathically upbeat assassin named Ana (Sylvia Hoeks).

Judith’s far-flung support team includes an underused Cathy Tyson (Mona Lisa, Help) who runs a London shoe repair shop with her daughter, Queenie (Savannah Steyn) and is a source of deep espionage intel. A young person subplot involves the relationship between Judith’s callow agency handler, Sam (Calam Lynch), and tech wiz, Queenie.

In the spy terminology of the film, Judith and Debbie are both WOACAs, an amusingly bureaucratic acronym for “women of a certain age”, which is key to the film’s concept and demographic target. Like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the series, Grace and Frankie (playing character a generation older), they’re adult professionals who serve as models of women’s importance when they are past the ingenue stage.

The one radical thing about Ride or Die, is that the two women talk openly about their “love” for each other, a relationship that is romantic in everything but sex (they’re both magnets for younger men). That level of passionate appreciation is fresher and more touching than what the crusty old term “buddy picture” signifies.

Ride or Die. Available on July 15 on Prime Video. Created by Tessa Coates. Cast: Octavia Spencer, Hannah Waddingham, Bill Nigh, Cathy Tyson, Sylvia Hoeks, Savannah Steyn and Calam Lynch.