Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

An absolute masterpiece in political philandering. Politics is poison. Politics is perversion. Politics is treacherous intercourse between any man and any other person, any woman and any other human with only one objective: to seize power, to retain power, to "make history" as if they could, not understanding that power is illusive and evasive, and history is not made by anything or anybody because history is and nothing else. What makes it is unknown of everybody. Big Ben here is only to dictate the time of the beginning of each episode, 9:22 a.m. The general idea is that a plain apparatchik of the conservative party manages to push aside the successor to Margaret Thatcher, the longest- serving peace time Prime Minister, who was too weak for the job, and he becomes nothing but the brute of the job who uses young women to get his inspiration, kills them as soon as they could become dangerous, and is in fact entirely manipulated by his own wife, a new Lady Macbeth who even manages to make him confront the new king and force him to abdicate. What's the best part of it is that it is thrilling to follow the actions of this apprentice sorcerer and to see how he manages any situation to his own advantage and yet is heading right into the wall because to succeed too long becomes dangerous for your own health in the British system where only the sovereign can last long because he or she is not supposed to play politics. It is thrilling because we know the only end can be his failure when the wall of success will become so hard that he will have to be eliminated for the simple survival of the political system.Yet you will learn only in the very last scene who the manipulator of it all is and what his or/and her intention is too. And it is true the series is intelligent enough and well enough done that you cannot know who that manipulator is though we see his/her black gloves at crucial moments but the episode systematically mislead you to believing it (he/she) is someone else.The series is also a very good criticism of British democracy based on the free press that is as free as a tornado in a narrow and deep gorge between two very high mountains. The press is in fact on a very short leash: make money with news and make the news if necessary to make money, like Citizen Kane used to say. Parliament is an amazing maze of corridors and staircases, a comfortable bar and a House of Commons with only one interesting session, Questions to the Prime Minister, every week or maybe more often. This Parliament is a farce in many ways, at best a circus for gladiators who have no right to kill one another but who can bruise their own and respective egos in all possible ways.It is so easy to make the public believe what you want them to believe when you can pull the strings that hold the press. And then you can always manage someone to get killed here and there, now and then, who is embarrassing or annoying the big masters.I am so glad I am not engulfed in such an ugly activity. And yet I am sorry everyday because of them because they terrorize my own life all the time with their own caprices and incompetence. After that you sure will loathe politics, or at best want to be one of the few who can control the game.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This was the follow up series to House Of Cards, continuing the rise and rise up the Greasy Pole of Francis Urquhart, good old FU to us viewer-confidantes. Or as in all of his friends opinions, a right old swine because he stops at nothing to cling on to power.FU is a UK Prime Minister with plenty of dark secrets in his murky past – just for a change – when from his wife he gets the idea of hiring a bright young woman as his "slave" to do his (political) bidding. While engaged in a running battle of wits with the earnest and wimpish ruling monarch he finds that he needs her ideas, input and eventually her sexual support too. And only natural too, for what are Men but mere slaves to the Urge? Unfortunately along with his other aide she gets too many ideas, such as what really happened to his former lover? It's all as well done as the first series, and just as predictable – but refreshing cynicism on its own isn't quite enough this time round. When it came the climax was totally foreseeable – which only made me wonder why they couldn't foresee it! Introducing people per episode, nurturing them and then killing them off was something I used to laugh at in Star Trek over 40 years ago. However, ignoring the shallow ending the plot itself was engrossing enough to keep me hooked for another four hours, and Ian Richardson's wonderfully nasty and slimy performance certainly was a masterclass.It's an entertaining time passer which also informs and educates if you need it – never ever trust any politician, or aristocrat for that matter, period.

Compared to the first House of Cards, this is a retread of familiar ground, far-fetched in spots, and fizzles out in the 'explosive' finale. It is still fun to watch, and together with Cards, a great primary text.The narrative tension arises from the fact that the protagonist—Francis Urquhart, now Prime Minister after the events of the first one—is both an actor inside the story and the capricious narrator who in telling it attempts to control that story and his environment, Lolita-wise. (which Ian Richardson has not only known, as anyone in his trade can be expected to, but actually played on the stage, in Albee's Broadway version as apparently Nabokov himself)We are roped in the story, by Urquhart making the camera a co- conspirator on his side.This could have been of more interest than the first. The issue of co- conspiratorial viewing more ambiguously rears its head here, because mixed with parliamentary intrigue, the great deceiver is beginning to show signs of doubt and remorse, but knowing him to be a demagogue, can we trust him? Is he lucidly toying with us? Do we open up? It all comes back to Lolita, the seduced younger woman, his mirrored nemesis the current Chief Whip. It is good material, a good text to work from.Alas, the same problem persists as in Cards.Urquhart's doubt grows from memories of the first film, the whole Mattie Storin affair. If you haven't seen Cards, he has done something horrible even by his standards, and tormenting visions begin to seep into and disrupt his control. Now there are two types of film when dealing with cinematic memory, mostly distinct of each other. Films where memory is a narrative device and the reminiscing self fetches the images as insight into some past story, a category of which this is a part of, and can be relied on for a good jigsaw but hardly much else. Hitchcock usually worked in this way.And films, much fewer, where true to the function of memory, images steal into the story as insight of the narrating self, images not always in the right order or logical that partly create the self. All the great films (as well as Lolita) fall in this latter category.So the narrative is clean and logical, which the British do better than anyone. The acting is fine, Richardson above all. But, there is no reason whatsoever for Urquhart to be truly confiding to the viewer, especially now that we see aspects of Urquhart he does not control. Everyone else is being lied to, uncertain and fumbling, but we are not. This is as if Lolita was just a chronicle of mischiefs, missing layers.

This is great and fascinating. You should watch it! Not sure is it an action or a crime-thriller? Maybe adventure.Actually in this show I have learned what is parliament politics. The owner of this serial are British - it explains why it is so good. This is real - the ways in the politics... What to do, to survive. Actors are so fine in this movie. No complains. All scenes are great. King is King - his role is the best.I have open my brain to maximum when I was watching it.I give my full ten points for this movie.Best, D