This red-blooded, rip-roaring battle of the sexes packs a delicious punch! CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives Sienna Miller and Dominic West's War four stars

Published: 23:04 BST, 4 October 2026 | Updated: 23:18 BST, 4 October 2026

War (Sky Original) 

Rating:  Four stars

Rating:

Lawyers are lovely. We know this from The Split and its BBC1 sequel, The Split Up, romantic dramas that reveal how top legal firms put their clients' mental health and spiritual wellbeing above all other priorities.

Winning the case is never as important as doing the right thing.

Except, shockingly, this isn't always the case when law firms go to War. Some legal eagles are actually vultures. 

When solicitor Nick (James McArdle) starts making noises about needing the 'moral high ground', his partner (legal and marital) Serena slaps him down: 'We need no such thing. We're lawyers, it's not what we're set up for.'

Celia Imrie, in a delicious turn as the head of a rival firm, went even further. She ordered her team to eradicate all evidence of collusion with a client's dirty tricks, and create an entirely new paper trail. 

Sienna Miller plays Carla, a Hollywood A-lister married to a tech billionaire — Dominic West as social media boss Morgan in new divorce drama War

This is the legal system, not only with the gloves off but with the knuckledusters on.

Sienna Miller plays Carla, a Hollywood A-lister married to a tech billionaire — Dominic West as social media boss Morgan. Sick of the marriage and suspecting him of infidelity, she sets a honeytrap for him.

After an awards night, he is approached by a sultry woman in a backless satin dress, who proposes a tryst.

Morgan manages to resist temptation for about the time it takes the lift to reach his luxury apartment, and succumbs before he's through the door. Turns out that a penthouse does not qualify as 'moral high ground'.

By dawn, Carla has the photos she needs to nullify her pre-nup. 'You take him,' she instructs her lawyers, 'for every f*****g penny he's got. And he's got quite a few.'

That's all we require for a red-blooded, rip-roaring battle of the sexes. But the opening episode of War does too much due diligence with its back-story, introducing an ambitious would-be lawyer called Johnny (Archie Renaux) from Peckham, with a Del Boy accent and the brass neck to match.

Carla (Sienna) sets a honeytrap for her husband Morgan (Dominic) in their divorce battle

Johnny's job hunting became repetitive, and could have been condensed into a much shorter sequence.

All we had to know was that, after getting sacked from his day job as a waiter (for serving a City trader with a fist in the middle of his braying face), he landed a post at one of the two rival law firms... except his appointment wasn't quite what it appeared.

Many of the asides are beautifully observed. 

When Carla dons a disguise, to go off-duty in Paris, she does it in classic Hollywood style — by donning the red baseball cap of invisibility. No one ever gets recognised in one of those.

All the senior lawyers have gigantic egos and can't get to the end of a sentence without reminding everyone how talented and successful they are. 

Serena even does it when she's talking to her husband. Modesty is as over-rated as morality.