‘Ride or Die’ Review: Two Best Friends, One Body Count, and a London Skyline That Never Stops Burning

Hannah Waddingham has spent years being funny on television, and now Prime Video hands her a frying pan, a ski slope escape, and a body count to match. ‘Ride or Die’ pairs her with Octavia Spencer as two lifelong friends whose bond gets tested when one of them turns out to have a job that involves considerably more killing than either of them ever discussed over lunch.

The premise is simple enough to fit on a poster. Debbie, played by Spencer, is a former lawyer who traded her career for a comfortable life as a politician’s wife in London. Judith, played by Waddingham, is her closest friend of over two decades, the woman who shows up for every dinner and every school run. She is also, it turns out, a professional assassin, and when Debbie’s husband crosses the wrong criminal organization, the two women are forced onto the run together across Europe.

What makes the show work more than it probably should is the sheer force of its two leads. Waddingham throws herself into Judith with a physicality that genuinely surprised me, she skis, she brawls, she handles a car chase with the kind of conviction that makes you wish someone would just build her an entire franchise around this character.

Spencer, meanwhile, gets to do something she rarely gets space for, playing a woman who is smart and composed right up until the moment her whole world tips sideways, and she sells every ounce of that panic and fury.

Where the show stumbles is in everything surrounding them. The spy agency machinery, the shadowy boss pulling strings from behind a desk, the various handlers and weapons dealers who drift in and out, all of it feels like filler dressed up as plot. Eight episodes is a lot of runtime for a story that would have hummed along nicely as a two hour film, and by the back half I found myself waiting for scenes between Debbie and Judith rather than caring much about who was chasing them this week. The writing leans on genre shorthand more often than it should, and some of the twists announce themselves scenes before they land.

Still, there is something disarming about watching two women in their fifties get to be this loud, this violent, and this romantically viable without the show treating any of it as a novelty. The fight choreography varies by location and by character, which keeps the action from blurring together, and the show is smart enough to let its supporting cast have fun rather than just filling space.

Bill Nighy in particular slides into his role with the kind of dry menace that only he seems able to produce on command, and Ed Skrein brings a charm to his role that gives the middle stretch of the season some much needed lightness.

The emotional core never gets lost, even when the plotting does. Judith’s guilt over the life she has hidden from Debbie, and Debbie’s fury at discovering it, both feel earned rather than manufactured, and the flashback material tracing their friendship back decades gives the finale a weight it might not otherwise have had. It is a show that understands its real subject was never really the assassins or the mob money, it was always the friendship, and thankfully that part never wavers even when the spy stuff around it does.

I walked away from ‘Ride or Die’ entertained more often than not, carried almost entirely by two performers who refuse to phone in a single scene. The show asks you to forgive a lot of familiar spy plotting and a runtime that overstays its welcome, but the chemistry between its leads is strong enough to make that forgiveness easy. I’m landing on 8 out of 10, a show built on charisma first and plot second, and mostly better for it.

Did ‘Ride or Die’ win you over, or did the eight episode runtime wear you down? Drop your verdict in the comments.