DaViD´82

Granted, Letts's source material comes across as nothing more than an unsophisticated theatrical Southern variation on McDonagh's productions, but with all the unadulterated fun, who cares, right?

An animated comic book which, despite its fruitful and sturdy theme (a mutation drug), limps rather on the story side; in fact it develops nowhere. But you must admit it’s stylish. It’s a classic Whedon; tongue-in-cheek, full of keen-edged, self-denigrating dialogs and wisecracks, but fully aware of its roots. And that’s quite a lot for a “popcorn" snack.

Bearing in mind the BBC’s possibilities, this is “just" regular filmmaking craft, but an outstanding genre movie at the same time. In regular crime series, internal affairs/units uncovering corruption are often presented as hotbeds of corruption themselves or bureaucratic getting in the way of honest cops. But not here. It’s not just about trying to catch out a corrupt cop, but trying to catch a cop who knows the loopholes of the system inside out and he bends it to suit himself, to get to the best cases that would take him to the top, trampling over everybody else who is in the way. They don’t want necessarily to destroy him, just to clip his wings a little, but... But that doesn’t work if they have someone Lennie James standing against them (the first impression that he was just a second-rate alternative “because Idris Elba was busy" is immediately proven wrong), because excels in the role of a man who has to lead a team, solve cases, deal with his own personal, unenviable crisis and still keep one step ahead of internal affairs. His “Lutheran multi-tasking" parts that are what’s best about this series. The problem is that he is only given the same amount of space as a disillusioned new guy who wants to catch him out and an ambitious female undercover detective who operates in his team. And not that these two storylines were bad, they just aren’t as good. Too bad about the obvious final twist in the ambulance, but if nothing else, at least it gives some interesting options for season two. Also the initial deus ex machina with the accident is taking things a little too far, but otherwise it is a nice, down-to-earth and even the actions and the behavior of the characters was, (not just) for this genre, convincing. It’s refreshing to see that season two doesn’t simply regurgitate season one slightly differently and that it takes its own path where (despite the absence of the main powerhouse of season one) it loses none of its quality. What isn’t refreshing is that again we get deus ex machines where for incomprehensible reasons the authors felt the need to have all of the main protagonists somehow personally involved in the case. The City where this is set has a population exceeding ten million, but in this its like no more than ten live there. This rather takes away from the convincing down-to-earthness of season one, but even so, it has sufficient quality and suspense to make it more than just a regular crime series. Season three then completely breaks free from the chains of hitherto credibility, but the result is an incredibly high-octane and twist-full version of Internal Affairs which works (much better than anyone might expect) with the rather out-of-place seeming conspiring loose ends of the preceding seasons. I could criticize much about this, but, like it or not, I must admit that in some places I my knuckles turned white from tension (especially during the interrogation scenes), so it would be a bit hypocritical of me. In any case, for season four I personally would return to the original waters of everyday internal affairs unit routine. It really seemed for a long while that season four had taken a step back and that it turned into an affair full of twists where the burden of circumstances draws the characters into a spiral of wrong decisions. However, the final episode returns it to the “conspiracy" level. Not bad at all, but maybe a little unnecessary. It would have worked without that too. In any case, the tempo and suspense are right up there again, Thandie Newton and Lee Ingleby are brilliantly cast and so the greatest drawback is that this time there are notably fewer of the piece de resistance of this series, the interrogations. This time round there are only two interrogations that last the fundamental ten minutes. And that is unforgivable. | S1: 4/5 | S2: 4/5 | S3: 5/5 | S4: 4/5 | S5: 3/5 |

Too adult or even too dark? Not at all, but it doesn’t treat the child viewer like a fool out and dares to present him with mature problems, often not black-and-white. This is what makes this pleasant and considerably different (not just) from the rest of Marvel’s animated production. The series mainly scores points in the storytelling episodes, while losing them in the stand-alone episodes that generally revolve around “this character from the Marvel Universe" in cooperation or fighting against the X-Men.

As suggestive as it is, it is accordingly disturbing. And it is disturbing, you can bet the house on it. Refn's hypnotic approach to (not only) atmosphere enhances this impression.

A strong and supporting theme that, even in the weakest passages (and there are plenty of them; for example, the entire second half of the series, in which all the genius of the central characters unwittingly becomes a parody of itself), keeps the series afloat. However, I was actively annoyed even in the most powerful passages (and there are plenty of them; for example, the entire first half of the series), because the authors do not play a fair game, and key information from this psychological chess game of intellect, which the characters already know, is fundamentally only retroactively revealed. Moreover, it gives the impression of a radio play to which the visuals were added only subsequently. There are whole sections of episodes where we don’t get even five seconds of continuous silence. And so, in addition to the scenes where the characters have something to say and should be talking, there is a plethora of scenes where they should keep quiet, but they blather and blather and... And if it didn’t have an ending, they would probably still be babbling away to this day. They treat the viewer as a fool because there are the sort of scenes in every episode where "we see a sad figure, we know from previous events why she's sad and that she has a hell of a reason to be sad, yet we hear the character's inner voice, saying that she's sad, why she's sad, and that she has a hell of a reason to be sad." Grrr.

Melville's last film is unworthy of the name of its creator. Not because of its quality, but because of its technical side. It's hard to say if there were any funding problems, but in any case, it's inappropriate for most of the interiors to be superseded by cheap backdrops (at best) or artificial badly-drawn backgrounds (at worst) so that the movie, a substantial part of which takes place in cars, with amateur-looking rear projections and the action scenes are faked using toy cars. None of this can sink the movie, but unfortunately it draws attention to itself; which is doubly disappointing for a movie that stands or falls on whether or not you succumb to its specific atmosphere... Otherwise, it's classic Melville with all the trimmings; slowly and (very) carefully built, stubbornly silent, macho cool, and unpretentiously stylish.

However pleasant and good it is in the first third, the rest of it turned into the worst possible slap-dash pastiche void of logic, rules and anything that you might expect from a movie; this isn’t even B-movie material, it’s... It’s a letter that doesn’t even appear in the alphabet. At the beginning it looked like a Marvel variation on John Constantine, but in the end it is simply the world of the Green Lantern and defenders around him, dressed up in fantasy garb.

Lethal Weapon: Iron Man Xmas Edition after which I may or may not have rather watched a comedy spin-off called Mandarin: Origin or a kids’ popular science show, Iron Child and his mentor, The Mechanic. A good old action buggy comedy (they say that this format is out of fashion... I’m glad they didn’t tell Black about that!) that has everything it should; from the very beginning right up to the eighties-style final credits. And when you compare it to other routine episodes, I needed so little; a good screenplay (in terms of this genre, of course), a proper villain and to make Stark the direct protagonist of the action scenes. Which meant the end of strict division into mutually unrelated passages of a “situation comedy with Stark" versus an “uninteresting, impersonal action with a CGI Iron Man".

To describe it as a French "zombie" Twin Peaks is a cheap description that's a long way from the truth, but on the other hand, it does offer itself... Eight episodes about a town in the foothills where peaceful coexistence is disturbed by returning (un)dead household members who have not died of natural causes and who have somehow not been told that they are long since dead. As cheesy as it sounds, it works perfectly well thanks to the unique characterization of the characters (and their logical behavior) and very suitably chosen intimate stylization, and one would believe that if something like this ever happened, it would happen exactly like this. And despite the occasional lull in the storyline, it keeps you in constant tension precisely because you care about the characters, and especially because of the dense, disturbing atmosphere (strongly evoking Trier's Melancholia) massively doped with a musical undertones by Mogwai. Perhaps a warning to those who require all questions to be answered; it is similar to Twin Peaks also in the following respect. There are no clear answers here. Which is good - it would just lose its charm otherwise. I just don't know how, considering the season one finale (brilliant, by the way), they can maintain the civility on which it all stands for season two.