Black Doves season two on Netflix: Keira Knightley makes an excellent hitwoman in this silly but charming thriller

The first series of Black Doves was an unlikely mash-up of Love Actually and the Keanu Reeves John Wick action movies that somehow hit the target. Which was extraordinary given that a) Love Actually is the worst two hours ever committed to celluloid, and b) that the one doing the Keanu-esque running around and shooting was Keira Knightley – a distinguished movie star but not someone typically associated with rapid-fire derring-do.

But it had oodles of charm and now it’s back for a second season (from Thursday), which takes a risk by removing the Christmas setting so essential to that original series. It is also far more ludicrous – quite a boast for a show that started with the premise that Knightley is the wife of a high-flying politician by day, ruthless killer by night.

What’s changed is that now Knightley’s other half (Andrew Buchan) is about to be installed as British prime minister – a rise to power he has achieved while remaining in the dark about his wife’s hidden life as international woman of mystery. So essentially we’re being asked to believe that, say, Samantha Cameron or Sabina Higgins were jetting around shooting people while their husbands got on with their own jobs – and that nobody noticed.

It’s obviously very silly, but then rarefied silliness is the stock in trade of Black Doves creator Joe Barton, who has a history of taking big swings that may or may not come off. He is responsible for one of the best thrillers of the past decade in the UK-Japanese thriller Giri/Haji, but then missed big time with the lamentable time travel caper The Lazarus Project and struck the mother of bum notes with his revival of Amadeus.

Black Doves lands somewhere between all of those in that it’s certainly no classic but moves at pace – and benefits from matey chemistry between Knightley and Ben Whishaw, who plays Sam, an existentially woebegone hitman who wonders if there’s more to life than driving around London dispatching targets with a silencer.

But this is Knightley’s show and she brings a great flustered mum energy to the part as the world of the Black Doves begins to unspool amid skulduggery from within. Something is targeting the leadership of this underground organisation – starting with Helen’s fixer Reed (a flinty Sarah Lancashire).

As is mandatory with this sort of thing, there is also some comic relief in the form of Carlow’s Ella Lily Hyland (Williams) and Port Talbot’s Gabrielle Creevy (Eleanor) – and while both are fine, they have so very clearly been pigeonholed as “comedy Celts” where their accents are part of some joke we’re all supposed to be in on. It lands weirdly but is the only wrinkle in an otherwise accomplished thriller and confirms Knightley’s true calling was to play an international hitwoman who sleeps with a gun under her pillow.

With the nights drawing in, there are much worse things to binge. And as you sit down to Black Doves, there is the bonus that at least you aren’t watching Love Actually.