Reviews

This pilot was, by chance, the 10,000th title I've rated on IMDb, so I was obliged to mark the occasion with a review. I only later noticed the series (or at least season 1) is a remake of a Swedish/Danish series "Bron" *and* that the original was airing on another channel. I had already missed the airings of the first episodes, but it does not matter: if a remake is done well enough, it does *not* matter how faithful it is to the original - or, even how similar the remake is. Some of the best remakes or "re-imaginings" aren't even in the same genre as the original, be they films or TV series.

The Bridge, however, appears to be in the same genre - crime - as the original and at least starts with the same genius of an idea. It's actually ironical that Americans *haven't* made a series about a murder on the USA-Mexico border - *literally* on the actual border, as it is such an obvious idea, at least in hindsight.

The first thing that is noticeable - or unnoticeable, as it may seem to some - is how confident The Bridge is. It does not pull out any special "style", "flair" or CGI-dazzle - just plain old good writing, acting and film-making (the technical aspects). That confidence pays of in the rarest of qualities in film & TV: total believability.

One will definitely have questions after the pilot, but those questions will most likely be of the speculative type, such as "Why *is* Sonya so odd?" - not of the accusatory type, such as "Why should we take any of this seriously?" Because we will take The Bridge seriously. It feels real. Sure, it has some restrictions (such as no nudity and no swearing) placed on it that would not exist in an HBO show, but like The Walking Dead, for example, it circumvents those restrictions. This is not a show in which nude sex or swearing are needed to make the viewer buy the story.

In hindsight, it is easy to say that while the pilot raises questions, it is entirely intentional on part of the makers: the answers *will* come, be they about the plot or the characters. Speaking of which: while the plot is not even at half-point at the time of writing this review, its progression has remained intriguing and utterly addictive. One should beware of making assumptions - they *may* crumble in any of the following episodes, as the multiple plot strands *may* at an unexpected moment take a surprise turn or meeting that is still entirely plausible. One simply *must* know where this will end up.

Then there are the characters. Diane "Bridget von Hammersmark" Kruger takes a difficult, oddball character not unlike Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan or Jessi XX of "Kyle XY" and makes her completely believable. Whereas the implausibly over-rational yet exactly because of that so entertaining 'Bones' feels a bit of a stretch, Sonya Cross somehow feels like someone who may exist somewhere in our world - and at this point we know her only by *some* of her eccentricities. Kruger, like the underrated Jaimie Alexander in her phenomenal role as Jessi XX, uses little expressions and subtle body language that speak volumes about the character. Alexander had the benefit that the viewers knew her character's back-story when she made her appearance in Kyle XY, but Kruger has to act without that safety net.

Demian Bichir as the other main character, Marco Ruiz, is only slightly less impressive, and that is because for the dynamic to work, his role needs to be the "average man". We learn more about his character in the pilot, but its the insight we get that matters, not the secrets withheld as in Sonya's case.

The attention to supporting characters is impressive, too. None of them comes across as a stockpile character, thanks to both good writing and excellent, experienced actors such as Annabeth Gish, the legendary Ted Levine, the fantastic Thomas M. Wright or Matthew Lillard (has it already been 17 years since Scream?), to name but a few.

There is much to praise, but A Very Special Mention goes to the show-makers for the courage of having the Mexicans actually speaking Spanish among themselves, often even while in the presence of American characters who cannot understand them, whereas the viewer can, thanks to the subtitles. And some poor subtitle-hater somewhere probably thought that because The Bridge is an American remake of a foreign show, they would not have to bear any subtitles. An impressive 9/10, one of the 942 I've given out of 10,000 (the remaining 234 are 10/10s).

Have you ever rated anything 1/10?

Regardless of your answer, you *need* to see this mind-boggling episode. Like with the movie Gigli, the question is not "Why?" but "How?" How did they manage to do something this terrible that equals viewer torture?

Not for a second - literally - is this funny. It really is so hideously teeth-grindingly unfunny that it has to be seen to be believed. After this, you may want to think twice before rating something else 1/10. This is the perfect calibration tool.

You can guess my rating for this episode. I think the host puts it best at the end of the episode before storming away: "I can't tell how sorry I am that you had to watch that. What the f**k is this company doing?"

This is great! Faith on Criminal Minds was at an all-time low after the disastrous season opener, but this seems more like something from the far superior The Closer, the absolute ruler of the Crime Procedural Drama. The Closer contains no nudity, profanity or violence unacceptable on national TV - it plays by the same rules as Criminal Minds, yet almost always comes out on top in comparison.

This time, the world of Criminal Minds seems more like the world of The Closer: a complex mixture of endless shades of gray, multiple viewpoints and not just black and white, right and wrong. Also, the repercussions of Prentiss' return are now allowed to play out - something that was crucially lacking from the "All Is Well" spirited season opener.

Normally, it would be necessary to give spoilers in order to point out the flaws, but not here: The plot and unsub-of-the-week are both layered, complex and surprising. More importantly, everything holds up in the end. Most importantly, the disturbing atmosphere established in the opening refuses to dissipate over the course of the episode and for once, not everything ends up neatly tied up in a pretty package. The unsub's methodology has a progression similar to John Doe's in SE7EN, yet is different. The unsub is more human than ever before and harder to simply brand as "a psycho" or a sociopath. You might even feel sympathy for them. *This* will linger in the memory for a long time.

Without the damage to the overall credibility to Criminal Minds that the Reaper arc and the Doyle arc did to the series, this would be a 9/10. Now it's "just" an 8/10 - but that is still great!

"Anyone familiar with Star Wreck?" director Timo Vuorensola asked today on an 'Iron Sky on Tour' screening. What seemed like everyone in the sold-out screening raised their hands.

"Anyone familiar with Moon Nazis?" he then asked. Somewhere in the back, someone raised their hand.

"You know, we did a survey and there *actually* are people in the real world who do believe there are Nazis on the dark side of the Moon. Oh, and the genre of this movie is Diesel-punk." (This from my memory - and translated into English.)

With this in mind, you know this movie is comparable to the immortal Airplane! and the best of the Python movies. Except that with barely 7.5M euros, the filmmakers have created a movie that contains, as the director explained, about as much CGI shots as Transformers: Dark of the Moon (now *that* reference must be very intentional as this is definitely the better movie) and looks about as good as a 2D version of that movie.

So, the camp humor may not be to some people's liking, but if you like camp, this is a nearly-perfect sci-fi specimen of the genre. In all categories of movie-making from script to screen, this is a triumph. Only nitpicks would complain. It's so hilarious, the audience roared in laughter throughout and even applauded in the middle of the movie. No one did that in a screening of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Not only "may" this be the cult hit of the year, it would be *very* surprising if the rest of the year brought along a bigger cult hit. This is a 9/10. Miss this at your peril. Or if you just lack a sense of humour and/or hate non-serious sci-fi.

The question is not "why?" but "how?" when it comes to the terribleness of this "movie". It's obvious the makers had delusions of grandeur, but were forced to work under restrictions.

They had no budget, so all the FX is self-consciously "stylicized" to look unreal. Sadly, it just looks absolutely ****. How did they manage that?

They had to deliver a Guns & Blades Movie with a PG-13 rating, so all the fights are "coreographed" so that no blood ever spills on screen. Sadly, it just makes all battles totally unengaging and laughable: Violet's blades never even become bloody, no matter how many men she stabs! How did they ever think it would work?

The movie is also horribly overwritten, forgetting the Rule of Cool: Unless your movie is Inception or The Matrix, do NOT try combining the cool and the cerebral - just pose like hell and don't outstay your welcome. Even at 88 minutes the movie manages to be too long. The six minutes longer unrated version is not likely to improve the movie because of the final "how?"

How can the movie look so painfully unreal that after 20 minutes your eyes are likely to start bleeding? When the prevents the viewer from suspending their disbelief and constantly screams at the viewer that they are watching a lousy, lousy movie, any attraction for the movie is impossible.

One of the worst "movies" I've ever seen. So ironical that it is a Screen Gems production... Well, at least it was on TV for free.

This is a baffling movie. The TV just happened to be on when it started, but I only took attention when I heard Joe Mantegna's voice. Now there is one actor who can always be relied on not to phone in his performance. Then I saw Jean Smart, who had impressed me as the First Lady of USA in '24' as one of the most believable characters in a show that was full of nonsense – entertaining nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. The iconic Charles Durning, still with us at the time of writing, gave me one more reason to watch. And when the severely underrated Kari Matchett appeared, I knew I had to sit this one through, though I had, based on program information, beforehand dismissed this movie as "Yet Another 13-in-a-Dozen-American-Xmas-Movie". Matchett had managed to fly 6 years under my radar until she appeared as the only good thing in the miserable Cube 2: Hypercube. Thankfully she's received plenty of roles after that movie, appearing as a guest star in many high profile series such as '24', 'ER', 'Ugly Betty' and 'Criminal Minds', but ironically all her proper star roles were in series that were short-lived: she was superb in 'Invasion', great in 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip', did what she could in the doomed 'Heartland' and delighted in 'Crash'. I'm looking forward to see her in 'Covert Affairs', which predictably lasted only 27 episodes in USA.

But I digress. 'A Very Married Christmas' surprised me positively at the start. The scenes of Joe Mantegna's character Frank imagining his wife's "hobbies" were hilarious and his narration was witty. Also, Mantegna reminded us with his facial expressions and timing that he is also a great comedian. The writer and director seemed to be on fire as well, surprising us with office comedy, well-placed match cuts plus rare iris-ins and iris-outs. Scenes and shots had imagination: the mall bench scene, the doorstep shot, the pie shot, the bed shot, the "carried away" scene, the "incident" scene and "the office meeting" scene. But then something happened.

At around three fifths into the movie, at the "closing time" scene, the movie suddenly fell flat on its face. It seemed that from that point on, a team of replacement writer & director took over, despite not having the talent that had delivered what we had seen so far. We had seen some quality dramedy (which is a really hard genre), but the replacements could not even decide whether to do "serious" drama or "plain" comedy, let alone provide either. Worse still, one character spoils the ending for the audience, the writer treating us like dummies, and another character is not even given an exit scene – they just vanish from the movie! And then there are the mandatory "life lessons" and American-Xmas-Movie clichés, which seemed so blessedly absent over half of the movie.

In all senses, the first three fifths are an entertaining 8/10 movie, but then there is an abrupt collapse into a dreary 2/10 waste of time – and you can tell from the actors' performances that they too have lost the joy. It's hard to rate such a schizophrenic movie, so an indifferent 5/10 that's just below the IMDb average of 5.5 (at the time of writing) seems appropriate. *Now* I understand why it took *seven* years for this movie to get a premiere in Finland. I wonder if the original novel is better

Obviously even the idiots in charge of making decisions to finance the first Librarian movie realized where they had gone wrong: a writer, who had delusions of grandeur and a director who couldn't direct if Christopher Nolan was directing *him*. So, they hired a new writer who came up with a less convoluted, less FX heavy script, and most importantly, a director, who has some solid directing credits: Jonathan Frakes (Star Trek: First Contact, several TV episodes).

Then they cast the actors. No more *loads* actors whom obviously had ended up deeming the first movie's script and their paycheck an insult to them. No, limit the number: Bob Newhart, Jane Curtin and Olympia Dukakis all return, but their screen time is kept to bare minimum. The main roles here go to the ever-reliable Eric Avari (a regular guest star of tens of TV shows), Robert Foxworth (he used to star in Falcon Crest in the 1980s), and Gabrielle Anwar, at this point *still* best known for her role in Scent of a Woman - 14 years earlier. Of course, she'd come to escape the prospect of starring in Librarian 3 by getting roles in The Tudors and the magnificent Burn Notice. Bottom line: less actors, and more importantly, less demanding (in terms of money).

Now, they had money left. The sets in this second movie no longer look laughable, they are actually passable. The FX no longer looks incredibly painful, it's "just" lame. Unfortunately, all these improvements come with a price: the script is dull, dull, dull - because it can't *afford* to be exciting. Of course, had they chosen a better writer, they could have filmed this practically in one room and still made it exciting (Cough! Reservoir Dogs. Cough!) Also, by the time the climax was being filmed, the production seems to have run out of money again - cue horrible CGI.

No, while a staggering improvement over the first film, this still rises no higher than a 4/10 complete waste of your time. Even Frakes can't work miracles from such a dull script. Apparently a third one exists, so if they show it, I'll check it just for completeness' sake.

Believe the reviews that rate this movie poorly - the praising ones are obviously either false reviews done to promote the film or by people who are too in love with the subject matter to be able to write *objective* reviews. At first, I did not intend to bother reviewing the movie, but upon seeing the sequel, I kind of had to.

So, this first Librarian movie is a made-for-TV original movie. This, of course, limits the budget. There's nothing wrong with that - unless the makers get overambitious. And they did. Result: what little money and time they had to be spread so wide amongst all aspects of production that absolutely *none* of them work - you simply can't get quality results with little money and severely limited time.

The biggest problem, of course is the script. Had the writer been paid more and given more time (or replaced by a better writer), the script might have made more sense, and more importantly, it might have been more tailored to fit the allocated budget. As was the case, we got poor plot, poor dialog, FX sequences the FX department couldn't afford, and sets the props there was no money to build. The result is a movie which is actually painful to watch.

We have actors, who have proved they are capable: Noah Wyle (ER), Sonya Walger (pre-Lost), Kyle MacLachlan, Kelly Hu (X2), Jane Curtin, Olympia Dukakis, Clyde Kusatsu - but obviously they were paid so little most of them probably thought, "Frak it, I'm gonna do the bare minimum and go home." And, damningly, "director" (and I can't stress in how loose a sense I use the word here) Peter Winther apparently was OK with all of the above - or he too thought like the actors.

Please do not watch this. It is 2/10 crap, no matter how much you try to spin it.