Reviews

First off, there are spoilers. Second, the disclaimer...I couldn't make it through the entire season. It was just that bad. I really, really wanted to like this. It's right in my wheelhouse as far as genres.

Let's start with the good, because there isn't a lot. The Japanese actors do a very good job and are quite believable in their roles, especially Kaieda and Fukamachi played by Takao Ohsawa and Hiroshi Tamaki respectively. Additionally, I would say that the opening scenes draw you in. The special effects are solid as well. But that's where the good ends and bad (and sometimes absurd) begins.

And the bad...where do we start? The characters of the American leadership are just awful stereotypes. How bad? They're so be that they couldn't even be called characters, they're actually charactictures. I actually had to check to see if this was intended to be a farce rather than a drama.

Second, we get to the suppositions of the maiden voyage. First, we are told the Sea Bat (the suoer submarine) was intended for the Japanese to use. Okay, maybe??? It's hard to believe that the United States would build the most technologically advance warship in existence and then give it to another country instead of using it, but I'll give that a pass.

However, we are also supposed to believe the following. 1) The Japanese crew would make the final check themselves without any American supervision; 2) The US would not even monitor this enough to know if a nuclear warhead was loaded; 3) The US would not even know if a nuclear warhead might be missing; 4) The whole US Naval hierarchy would not know the capabilities of the submarine and additionally 5) Not call in the designers or developers of the submarine and its technology to brief them once the Japanese commander's intentions are known; 6) That US cabinet meetings on the matter would be reduced to a conversation that would be below 1st grade level. Any of these would be laughable and a reason to totally dismiss the story. All of them together is just a total insult to the intelligence of the viewer.

I also found the naming of the submarine "country" the Yamato to be hilarious. So a commander who thinks he is leading the world to pacificism uses the name of a WWII battleship, the very symbol of the WWII Japanese war machine and imperialism, as the name of his "peaceful" country. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. And even funnier, the American president had no idea what the significance of Yamato was in history and it had to be explained to him.

Then we have the idiotic temper-tantrum thrown by a member of the US naval hierarchy, the sanctimonious cabinet meetings by the Japanese, the ineptitude of the United States Navy...quite frankly, it made the series so bad, I couldn't stay with it to the very end.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of political agenda influenced garbage that has now become commonplace on Amazon Prime and Netflix. They place their agenda above solid entertainment, entertainment that I'm paying for with my overpriced dues. This series almost singlehandedly caused me to cancel my prime subscription. They keep jacking up the price so they can produce this dung heap.

My advice to viewers, don't.

This is a really hard show to review, because it's really all over the place in many ways. It's almost as though the writers/creators of the show were schizophrenic or something, starting in one direction then going down a totally different path.

I'll start with the basics. No Good Nick starts out as a basic sitcom with the premise that an outsider is thrown into a family and it shakes the family up a bit. The outsider, Nick, it turns out, has ulterior motives. She's a teen con artist working for a con artist couple, who want to fleece the family Nick is living with.

Some people have taken issue with the acting in this show, but for me, the acting was okay and in some episodes very good. The writing, however, was uneven at best. A lot of the comedy seemed forced to me and there were too many instances where dialogue was more stupid than funny. I'll give it a little bit of a break because the nature of sitcoms is that characters start out as caricatures. One only hopes that eventually these characters become more real and worth watching as the show goes on and to some degree that's what happened.

So the show is chugging along as a basic sitcom and then, after the first 14 episodes, the show totally changed directions. A couple of episodes took the characters that you are really beginning to care about and then just trashes them...just literally trashes every good thing you liked about the characters and the show. The mood goes from light and funny, with a touch of seriousness to a dark, gloomy show about revenge. Truth be told, the show almost lost me at that point. Even the character that was supposed to be most sympathetic in those few episodes, Nick, I grew to like less and less.

Just when I about swore off the show, the show switches again. The last few episodes of the 2nd season were probably the best of the show. Not necessarily a lot of comedy, but there were a lot of very real human moments which kind of redeemed the show for me. You got to see the other sides of several of the characters and even started to like them again. You also got to see the younger actors of the show (Siena Agudong, Lauren Lindsey Donzis, and Kalama Epstein) dig deeper in some pretty emotional moments.

I know it isn't necessary for a show to categorize itself, but what exactly are the show's creators shooting for with this show. It was a sitcom, that became an almost too dark revenge show to even be considered a comedy, to being a family dramady. Sometimes, they just plain wore out viewers trying to figure it out.

It will be interesting to see if the show gets renewed for another 10 episodes. The show pretty much wraps up most of the main storyline, although there was a dangling piece of information introduced in the final episode of the 2nd season, which could provide the direction of the show for the next season.

Olympus Has Fallen has a lot to like about it, but there are too many times that I was asking myself "Why would he do that?" or "Why would he think that?" or "How could that happen". There were just a few too many moments that didn't make any sense.

The action is intense and nearly non-stop after the opening 15-20 minutes of the film. Although there were many predictable moments, the film also has its share of twists to keep it interesting. I will say that I made one of the villains early on, although I'm not so sure it wasn't a lucky guess rather than a flaw in the film.

Gerard Butler is a likable and capable lead in this action film. As others have stated, his Mike Banning character can certainly draw comparisons to Bruce Willis' John McClane character from the Die Hard movies, and deservedly so. Like McClane, Butler's Banning fights as virtually a one-man army against the bad guys and has good one-liners that make him ever the more fun.

Aaron Eckhart is also enjoyable as President Asher, a character that tries to be nearly as tough as Banning. Morgan Freeman and Angela Bassett give their usual strong supporting roles, as does Melissa Leo in a small, but noticeable role as the Secretary of Defense. Rick Yune was solid as Kang, the main villain. For an action movie, the acting was much better than the norm overall.

Where I believe the movie does fall apart is the plot/storyline. The main plot was a little weak, although I could buy into that. After all, this is an action flick, so one generally has to suspend disbelief. But about every 5 or 10 minutes in this film, somebody does something that just didn't make any sense if one has any logic at all. Throughout most of the movie, Banning seems to be not only the great action hero, but the only character that has any sense at all. Brains + brawn with good dialog makes for a great action hero, but couldn't someone else use their brain occasionally.

Don't get me wrong, it was a fun movie that will keep you entertained for a couple of hours, just don't expect it to be the perfect movie. On the action, characters, and acting alone, I could have given this an 8 or so, but with the holes in the plot/storyline, it unfortunately drops to the 6.5-7 range, which in many ways is kind of a shame. I gave Olympus the 7.