Circles of Deceit: Kalon

Another of the four TV Movies starring Dennis Waterman as former SAS and Falklands veteran John Neil. He's now more resigned to his dangerous job working for a security service that regards him as expendable, as the only thing he is really suited to.

Kalon finds Neil's investigation into the murder of an army officer leading him into the activities of crooked merchant banker Rylands (Simon Cadell) and then a large international organisation involved in money laundering and drug smuggling. Rylands has discovered that his association with a Colombian crime boss was much easier to get into than out of with consequent - and constant - threat to his life, and it is poignant to see fine actor Cadell, probably aware he was himself terminally ill, in the role. Kalon is worth a watch but lacks some of the suspense and unexpected twists of a couple of others in the Circles quartet.

In this episode of "Circles of Deceit," the reluctant John Neill is again involved in an SAS assignment, which he's never too happy about taking.

He is asked to investigate the death of a military officer, and because of this, he needs to access the young man's girlfriend, also in the military. The question is, did she know what was going on with him, and is she involved?

Neither of them trust one another and at first, she follows him and vice versa. She doesn't believe John is who he says he is - a courier - and of course she's right.

John soon learns that the people who murdered her boyfriend are after her as well, believing she has knowledge of something. It falls to him to protect her - even when he's ordered to kill her.

Okay, not great. I don't know how many episodes there were - it seems like a group of TV movies, sort of like what happened when The Rockford Files went off the air. One is not listed here on IMDb but is on one of the discs from Netflix.

This is not the best of the four films in the series but possibly the worst. It is all about drug trafficking and money laundering. As usual Dennis Waterman reluctantly accepts an assignment by SAS or is forced to, a recurrent phrase in this film is "you have no choice", as various people are coerced to accept dirty missions and carry them through whether they like it or not, and the mission here is particularly nasty. A link in the racket is being shot to death, and SAS wants Dennis to find out why and by whom. The victim had a girl friend, Saskia Wickham, and Dennis tries to find out what killed the officer by her, but she actually knows nothing, and still Dennis is ordered to kill her, which he refuses to. For once in these films the lovely female leading character does not become a casualty, so it actually ends rather well. Still it is not as interesting as the other three, of which"Dark Secrets" is the best.