Reviews

What if you had only $10,000 and you needed to make a movie so you could join SAG and AFTRA? You might make a movie like this. You would have it set at night with mostly dialogue and very few characters. With nothing much going on but with a potential of something mysterious happening, based on said dialogue. But what if you had limited imagination? Then you might make the surprise reveal as mundane as this movie does. With no money for effects. In their wildest dreams they hoped for a Blair Witch, but all they got was a high school freshman art project. But hey, they sold it to Amazon!

Detective Danny Reagan loves a good foot chase. That's why, when he approaches a suspect, he stops 10 feet away and announces himself. Which results in one foot chase per episode. If you hate foot chases, you will still like the show, because it's well written (other than the contrived foot chases). Although all the family members have their own stories, Danny's story is the main story of the episode. This is a great show, and you'll get past the one foot chase per episode. Probably.

Very flat acting all around. This is becoming the new normal. They don't write dialogue that can give an actor a chance to establish a character. Every character in this movie has the same affect -- like the same person in different bodies.

Very meandering, make-it-up-as-we-go-along stories. Not much of interest happens, just tedium broken up by occasional violence. This kind of writing works in comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, but this isn't a comedy. So it's just boring and dreary. It also suffers from a lack of likable or charming characters, Jon Voight's being the possible exception. Any one of the characters could be bumped off and the viewer would probably not care. The tone is very flat and ho-hum in spite of the violence... maybe going for a Pulp Fiction affect but without the acting or writing talent to pull it off.

Adapted from a book, it seems like the screenwriters just sketched out enough scenes to cover the various plot points in the book, and unimaginatively. Richard Gere is too laid-back to breathe any life into the lifeless, inevitable plot progression, so it was miscast. Since there are no surprises in the story, no crisis/resolution sequences, perhaps the entire movie in flashback with narration could have saved it? I don't know.

More like propaganda, every point spoon-fed to the audience, laid on super thick, no suspense, just the inevitable unfolding of vigilante justice against over-the-top, cartoonish villains and an amoral lawyer. I usually like these kinds of movies, such as Charles Bronson's Death Wish movies. But this seems pitched to a child audience to lay in the point one brick at a time that justice is not to be found in courts. Seems like one of those Lifetime TV movies rather than something Nicholas Cage would be caught dead in. Yet there he is, for reasons known only to him. Skip it.

It started off with standalone episodes and was a pretty good police procedural. But after a few seasons it became a soap opera based around the characters' personal problems. By season 5 it's a complete soap opera, scenes rotating among various characters' ongoing dilemmas, soapy music... Too bad, because they used to have actual crimes being solved. I suspect the writers didn't like the show and decided to sabotage it slowly so as not to be noticed by clueless producers. Cleverly done!

Only 3 minutes in and a British-accented actor says cachet when meaning cache. I'm pretty sure that a British person would not misuse that word. Just as I've only heard Americans say "hone in" when meaning "home in." Seeing that the producer also produced Republic of Doyle, which was not very watchable, I'm going to skip the other 41 minutes of this episode.

If you like a lot of chasing around, this is your movie. You can start it in the middle then maybe skip to the beginning, watch it backwards, it won't really matter, because it's all just chase. Tommy Lee Jones can't save it, nor Matt Damon, nor Alicia Vikander as the latest Bourne hottie. So you got your basic foot chase, a motorcycle chase, of course a car chase. I think there should have been a downhill ski chase, but alas, the Las Vegas slopes didn't have enough snow when they filmed it. Even without a story, I would have given it another star if there were, say, a real cool skateboard chase, maybe with some leaping over cars, twisting 180 degrees mid-air to fire a few rounds, etc. There were plenty of bullets but, alas, not enough to qualify it as a proper art movie...

This is a PI show about a father/son private investigator team and their young assistant. It's set in Nova Scotia, which is beautiful to behold. Most of the characters are good, although the assistant and the star, Jake (played by Allan Hawco), are a bit much. Sometimes I have to quit an episode part way through because the stupidity of one of them make it too implausible to watch. But as a Netflix user, there aren't many TV shows I like, so I keep coming back to it when I'm too tired to do anything but watch TV. The series went 6 seasons, so I guess it was popular. Allan Hawco is a pretty good actor, and I'm glad to see he's gone on to more serious roles. I do enjoy the Nova Scotia scenery.

I think the British show "Coupling" is funnier, but not that much funnier. This show is kinda funny, not laugh out loud funny, but funny enough as TV goes. Coupling isn't all THAT funny either. I like the characters on Coupling better, though. The characters on this show are more realistic. Coupling's characters are more exaggerated, caricatured. Office is a better cop of a British show, but I don't think it's as funny as the British version either. Seems the British are more willing to have outrageous characters, along the lines of Seinfeld's Kramer. The characters on this show are about as outrageous as the ones on Friends. I think they'd do better to make the characters less believable, more outrageous.

I was amazed out the poor acting on the parts of Weber and O'Grady. It made the dialogue sound worse than it probably was. I hope to God this was a TV movie, or maybe a straight-to-video. Some of the stuff on SciFi channel seems better rehearsed and executed. It is clearly low budget, but that can be a good thing. Not in this case, though. They should have forked out some dough for some better leading actors. Or maybe they should have shot more than one take each scene. It seemed like the actors learned their lines ahead of each scene and then just shot the scene without rehearsing, kind of a walk-through. Oh well. Guess some people like it.

This episode seems to have been scrambled in the editing, with parts left out. The female "perp" dies at the end, of unknown cause, and then in the next scene they are talking about how she just confessed and the case is wrapped up ... drugs in the editing room is the only explanation I can think of. I've been watching the whole series on DVD and this is the first one that this kind of thing happened to. I generally like the show, that's why I'm watching the whole thing from season 1 on through to 8, as they become available on DVD. Netflix is really good for watching TV shows in their entirety without the commercials. Am I at the minimum 10 lines yet?