Van der Valk sets a new low bar for naff Sunday night crime dramas
If you’re coming to ITV’s Van Der Valk without knowing that it is a reboot of a 1970s crime series about a detective in Amsterdam, it won’t take you long to work out what you’re in for.
In opening with the mutilated body of a woman crucified next to a windmill before diving through some confusing cross-fade edits and launching into cheesy opening credits, the new iteration of Van Der Valk takes less than three minutes to establish its core tenets: gory murders, Amsterdam and utter naffness.
Commissaris Piet Van Der Valk returned to our screens in 2020 with Marc Warren (best known for Hustle) in the starring role. The first of series two’s three feature-length episodes sees Van Der Valk and his crack team of caricatures – the competent female partner given little to do other than wryly tease the male lead; the classic nerd coming to improbable conclusions; the cocky light relief and the eccentric jazz aficionado pathologist – tackling a series of gruesome murders that appear to be connected to the history of Amsterdam itself.
Combining an attempt at the elaborately staged homicides and underlying socio-political commentary of The Bridge with convoluted, grandiloquent clues in the manner of The Da Vinci Code – in this case, leaving notes containing quotes from 17th Dutch philosopher Spinoza written in extremely rare calligraphy ink with each of the victims – Van Der Valk careens around Amsterdam with all the subtlety of a stag do.
The crucified woman turns out to be a lawyer (killed using rat poison) who recently won a case for the city to evict a bohemian community of artists in order to develop the land into a tourist attraction. Her death is followed by the drowning of a PR executive who buried a report in favour of the so-called squatters and the land developer being burned alive. Someone is not at all happy with the outcome of this court case. The deaths, we are told by the encyclopaedic nerd, reflect the three plagues faced by the old city of Amsterdam – the Black Death, fire and floods – which are represented on the city flag by three crosses (now carved into the victims’ flesh).
As the police make wild leaps of deduction that prove to be correct, they interview an insufferable line-up of suspects. One – the husband of the first victim – is a slimy corporate lawyer who reacts to police questioning with the attitude of a particularly haughty patron in a posh restaurant. Indeed, he is so unbothered by either his wife’s murder or being a suspect that he conducts not one but two (!) police interviews while swimming nude lengths of a rooftop pool. A thread about domestic abuse seems only there to offer up extra villainy to his character and is thrown away as quickly as it is raised.
Instead, a weird amount of time is dedicated to Van Der Valk’s new romance, which seems entirely pointless and yet necessitates several cuts to his new squeeze gasping through the episode’s climax despite us knowing nothing about her.
Usually, multilayered would be a compliment, but Van De Valk muddies its own (canal) waters at every opportunity. The plot suggests it wants to tell a poignant story of social injustice; the execution fancies itself as a blood-soaked romp; the dialogue, full of oddly glib and sarcastic quips in the face of brutal murders, implies that it wants to raise a wry eyebrow at its genre; while the schlocky editing and thudding clichés seem like a painful homage to its 1970s origins. There are no surprises here; only eyerolls.
