Ride or Die on Prime Video: Hannah Waddingham, Octavia Spencer refresh old spy tropes in breezy action series

There are two main reasons to watch Ride or Die: Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer.

They’re two of the most compelling actors working today and to have them co-lead a project feels like a real gift. They’re in almost every scene of this eight-episode series, and mostly bouncing off each other with their crackling chemistry.

They’re very persuasive as Judith (Waddingham) and Debbie (Spencer), two women who have been best friends for more than 20 years. There’s a shorthand to the relationship created on screen, and the rhythms of that bond feels incredibly natural.

Which is why it hurts all the more when Debbie discovers that Judith has been lying to her from the very beginning, from the moment they met, joyously belting out Meredith Brooks’ B.... in the car.

Judith, you see, is not a forensic accountant as she’s always claimed, but an assassin. A very, very skilled and accomplished assassin, although as likes to point out, she only kills really bad people like war criminals, and for money because to do it for free has another label: serial killer.

Judith has just turned 50 and she’s becoming more reckless on her missions, going off-piste (literally in the opening scene mission, which takes place at an Austrian ski resort) and ignoring protocols.

Her handler, Sam (Calam Lynch), warns her that the super-secret agency she works for, run by a po-faced director (Bill Nighy), will retire her if she doesn’t execute her next mission without a hitch.

As if anything ever goes to plan – and if they did, there wouldn’t be a TV show – and her target, a middle man named Billy Donovan (Ed Skrein), slips loose. But more importantly, Judith comes upon a different murderous scene.

Among the bodies lying on the ground of the ritzy hotel suite where Billy was meant to be is MP David Claybourne (Jamie Parker), aka, Debbie’s husband, who has been a naughty boy and is hooked into some very dodgy dealings with a gang.

The jig is up, Judith has to come clean to Debbie about her real vocation, while also keeping them both alive from a figure from Judith’s past who may have put everything in motion in the first place.

Created by Tessa Coates, Ride or Die has all the beats of an espionage thriller including leaping off trains, fisticuffs, fleeing across borders with fake passports, car chases, black-clad henchmen, a wise supplier of spy-craft needs, and Interpol agents on their tail.

But rather than feeling like tired tropes, Ride or Die weaponises them to showcase its greatest asset, which is its leading ladies. You haven’t seen someone trying to fight an assassin while being poisoned until you’ve seen Waddingham do it in the close confines of a luxury train.

Peyton Reed, who has directed the Ant-Man movies as well as Bring it On and Down with Love, was the set-up director for this series, and he brought his experience in action and comedy to Ride or Die, which has a breezy and snappy vibe.

Waddingham and Spencer are both proven, award-winning talents in comedy and drama so they can easily pull off this tone, but one of the pleasant surprises is Skrein, who is commonly cast as cartoonish villains in bro movies, but can be charming and funny when given the material.

And not for nothing, but Waddingham and Spencer are both in their 50s and that combination of age and gender is not something that is usually allowed within this genre, unless you’re Monica Bellucci in Spectre, and even that was hailed as some sort of representation breakthrough just because James Bond had bedded someone age-appropriate. How depressing.

So to have these two characters not only exist as more than just sexual conquests but as active participants who are both driving as well as reacting to the plot is long overdue. It’s important that they’re always physically moving through scenes.

It’s the small things such as Judith’s, codename Whiptail, reputation among assassins and the underworld as the best of the best. It’s just taken as fact. Or that Debbie is a formidable force on her own, clever and resourceful, and the real power behind her husband’s political rise, even if he can’t acknowledge it.

But the real gem here is this friendship. The assassin thriller parts are the backdrop to explore how a friendship survives this level of secrecy and deception, and how who Judith and Debbie are fundamentally, as individuals shaped by the choices they’ve made and the lies they’ve told, respond to that kind of challenge.

By the end of the season, you have a solid sense of who both these characters are, and that’s not something you can say that often in this genre.

Ride or Die is streaming on Prime Video