toadyblegh's Reviews

True Detective: Night Country: Part 1 (2024)

Season 4, Episode 1

3/10

21 January 2024

It's really hard to understand how the producers managed to mess this up so badly.

The cast is amazing, the production standards are high, they apparently had all the budget needed to set up an amazing musical score... and then they overlayed the story with endless magical realism, heavy-handed attempts to highlight the significance of the moment, magic bears and voices from the beyond, ghostly figures and symbols.

The story moves slowly, the dialogue is wooden and then, alas, there are these constant interruptions with needless, hokum mysticism. It's so dull that it's painful to watch. This should have been amazing but somebody's ego made it dreary. It's such a waste.

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Ahsoka (2023– )

4/10

True to the original... in the worst way

23 August 2023

You have to love the commitment to 1970s production standards, which does mean this series does hark back to the original Star Wars, though sadly not in a good way. While the cinematography, set design and general look and feel might induce nostalgia for stop capture filming, the acting will take you all the way back to the 1950s - coy, unprofessional, frankly weird. The pacing of the first two episodes is just slow, the usual curse of shovelling too little story into too much time. All in all, it looks and feels like a Star Wars knock off put together by dim and not very talented first-year film students, or maybe a season of Buck Rogers in the 21st Century. It's not awful or completely unwatchable, just dull and badly made.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

1/10

Slow, dull and confused

20 March 2023

D&D: HAT, as I like to call it, suffers from a massive identity crisis as it tries to cater to players and particularly old grognards who have played the game forever as well as people who have no relationship to the game and, of course, children. The result is a coy hodge podge of PG nonsense with almost no story, at least an hour of exposition, and a whole lot of snark. This film is so much less than the sum of those parts, more than two hours of bad "jokes" and terrible accident. The most disappointing part, however, is the CGI, which is just terrible for some reason. It is painful to watch.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022– )

2/10

What?

5 September 2022

Warning: Spoilers

The acting and dialogue are patchy to bad, and the story jumps around to an endless group of low stake characters that nobody will be able to keep track of. The writers decided to completely erase the Silmarillion and retcon Galadriel's backstory, reducing her to a simpering, sulky ingenue serving as a vassal of Gil Galad which makes zero sense, Feanor and Ungoliant are both scoured from the canon... It's a story but not one that Tolkien would have recognized beyond the name of the characters. I get that Amazon want to exploit the LOTR brand but this has very little to do with the source material and is so poorly executed you have to wonder why they bothered.

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The Wheel of Time (2021– )

2/10

Where did all that money go?

20 November 2021

I know Amazon spent something like $85 million on this rubbish but it's hard to see where it all went. Certainly not on the talent or the script, the acting is wooden and the writing is hopelessly loaded with clichés and tropes, and the special effects are just not that special. The producers will be keen to pitch this as the new Game of Thrones but it feels a lot more like The Outpost, a very low budget swords and sorcery show targeted squarely at a pre-teen audience. It's just rubbish. Even the special effects look cheap, the only thing worth the audience's time are the locations, which are spectacular.

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The Long Call (2021)

2/10

Typically miserable, dreary UK detective drama

28 October 2021

A very slow moving drama with bland, forgettable characters and a peculiarly British miserablism. Cold, dank landscapes, broken families, sad people living sad lives... somehow this is meant to be interesting, representative or based in reality. It's unpleasant and uninteresting, just a dull ache on screen, shot through with inconsistencies and small errors, like a shot in which a sect of religious fundamentalists living ascetic lives somehow splashed out £200 for a fetching blue and very new Lecreuset casserole dish. It's television for people who like cold showers, bread and butter dinners, and self-flaggelation, about as much fun as a visit to the dentist and nowhere near as interesting. This seems to be a thing with UK television series, doubling down on national sadness, viewership as a form of extreme masochism. It's not a lot of fun and the story being told doesn't warrant the pain. I am guessing somewhere a producer thinks that this is somehow "realism", as if a gay detective returning to their home town and interacting with their fundamentalist family that rejected them while investigating a kidnapping likely sexual abuse is somehow part of the mainstream of experience. It's rubbish.

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FBI: International (2021– )

1/10

Utter dross

7 October 2021

There is just nothing good to say about this procedural. It's American exceptionalism coupled with dreadful acting, soggy plot lines, poor cinematography and terrible writing. Nobody should watch it.

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The Green Knight (2021)

2/10

Tedious and dull

22 August 2021

Grief, this movie is dull and incredibly poorly acted. One of the weirdest parts is how every character seems to have adopted a different regional accent, something you will automatically notice because there is absolutely nothing else happening on the screen. Ever. It just goes on and on against a backdrop of greys and greens, a soupy backdrop to the endless boredom. Sure, there are classical references to tease the most pretentious sensibilities and a cast of famous actors, all of whom seem to be reading from a different script, but as one critic says it takes "patience" to appreciate the layered significance, meaning you'll have to sit through two hours of very little happening and a sonorous sound track to appreciate the artiness of it all. A total waste of time.

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The Nevers (2021– )

3/10

Jumps the shark right out the gate

23 May 2021

Warning: Spoilers

The Nevers is a strange slow. The pacing is just off, it dodders and then rushes and dodders again. Still, it was watchable if not engaging until it jumped the shark from Victorian steam punk fantasy to science fiction and the plot unravels completely. The story is a bit banal and stupid, something the producers seemed to be aware of when they decided to added 15 minutes of marketing for the show after each episode... you know, just in case people hadn't decided for themselves that this was somehow cool and edgy. It's not and the hard sell won't make it so.

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Shadow and Bone (2021–2023)

3/10

Bland teeny-bopper fantasy

24 April 2021

It's a shame that somebody in the series' marketing team tried to make the association between Game of Thrones and this low-rent pre-teen fantasy series. Neither series benefits from the association. Shadow and Bone clearly doesn't have the budget or production standards, could not attract the same quality of actors, is aimed at a completely different market and is nowhere near as engaging. The acting is dreadful, the lines delivered with the dead intonation peculiar to actors who have no idea of what they're saying or why it's coming out of their mouths. The narrative drags, from tedious sub-plot to even more tedious sub-plot. I'd suggest that a better comparison would have been with the dire Motherland: Fort Salem, which targeted the same audiences and was roughly the same standard.

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The Watch (2020–2021)

1/10

What?

5 January 2021

I don't really know where to begin with this one. The original story was charming, funny and coherent, this is none of those things. It's a hopeless mess of fantasy, punk and industrial landscapes, possibly intended to be edgy but really just cheap and ugly. The acting is terrible, particularly Richard Dormer who is hamming it up as a low-rent, Jack Sparrow wannabe with all the charm of a freshly-filled adult diaper. The whisper thin story jumps around aimlessly and arbitrarily, with very little connecting the various interactions. It's just woeful and sad and tragic.

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The Serpent (2021– )

2/10

Worthy but so, so, so dull

5 January 2021

In many ways this a beautiful production, gloriously shot and set, with strong acting and a dark, seamy story to feast on. Sadly, it suffers from the curse of Netflix, the need to create a season's worth of content from a single story. As a result, the series tries to pad about 90 minutes worth of story out over eight increasingly dreary episodes, punctuated with long, knowing looks and annoying cut scenes. The resulting production is unbearably slow, which is aggravated by a jumbled time line which makes the story even more tiresome to follow and very understated drama, which would be appealing if you weren't dying inside waiting for something, anything, to happen. It's incredibly frustrating because there is so much to like and yet it's a complete mess that most people will give up on within three episodes. Don't do it, you'll resent the time spent on it.

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Helstrom (2020– )

6/10

90 minutes of story in 10 episodes

18 October 2020

Helstrom isn't terrible, but nor is it particularly good. It suffers from the curse of the Netflix/Hulu format - 10 long episodes dumped for streaming, that forces producers to fill the long minutes with needless back cuts, dreary prologue and stuffy detail. As a result the story drags painfully to a predictable, tiresome conclusion signalled several episodes in advance. It doesn't help that the underlying story is basically an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the acting is patchy - Sydney Lemmon is remarkable, Tom Austen is lost playing a character so dull and uptight that nobody could ever have made them interesting. It's not all bad, though. The cinematography is incredible, the soundtrack is great, the wardrobes are sublime (Ana's clothes), the sets... well... All in all, there are good bits in Helstrom, but the whole is a lot less than the sum of its parts.

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Raised by Wolves (2020–2022)

1/10

Woeful

27 September 2020

Ridley Scott made some groundbreaking films in the 80s and 90s, but his approach looks stale and old fashioned today. The production looks dated, the dialogue is ridiculous, the script is piss poor, the story is stupid, the acting is atrocious (OMG, Travis Fimmell is so bad). This is just dire and sad, a tragic reminder from Scott that talent is transitory.

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Motherland: Fort Salem (2020– )

3/10

The viewership isn't wrong

21 May 2020

The ratings tell a story - around a quarter of million people watching, just 70,000 in the key demographic (during a lockdown when we all have too much time on our hands). That's poor by any standard and it's not hard to see why. The show is badly written, poorly paced, poorly acted. It's an overwrought teen drama based on a very weak premise with cardboard cut-out characters whose actions make very little sense. The enormous number of enthusiastic reviews from one-time reviewers, in direct contrast to the tiny handful actually watching this show, is telling. It speaks to an underlying lack of integrity in the production team which is visible in the story-telling. There is a cynicism to Motherland: Fort Salem, a tendency towards cheap button pushing that grates constantly and knock-off Ridley Scott camera work that makes it feel like an '80s drama (seriously, somebody watched Black Rain way too many times as a kid). I'd suggest avoiding it, but so many already are and I doubt that many will change their minds before this is cancelled.

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His Dark Materials (2019–2022)

10/10

Beautiful and brilliant!

4 November 2019

Episode 1 holds out enormous promise for the remainder of this series. It's visually gorgeous, with impressive sets and great CGI. The acting is impressive, especially from Dafne Keen who is impressive as Lyra. The story is great and it's being told extremely well. I love it.

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See (2019– )

1/10

Oof... This is grindingly awful

1 November 2019

I don't even know where to begin with this dreadful, poorly conceived and badly written snooze-fest. It's just terrible. The entire cast look embarrassed to be there, the story line is beyond ridiculous, the acting is pained and confused, the production standards are poor... There's just nothing to recommend this. It's bad. Really, really, really bad.

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Treadstone (2019)

4/10

Started well enough, but has started to drift...

30 October 2019

Warning: Spoilers

There's a lot to like about Treadstone. It's fast paced, plenty of action and tension, beautifully filmed and, for the most part, well acted. Sadly, the story has started to drift and becoming increasingly opaque and complex, with multiple converging story lines, some of which are incredibly silly (like a super-powered. super spy guarding a secret missile silo for decades in the hopes of one day restoring the Soviet Union). It's only three episodes in and the series has already jumped multiple sharks, while making it almost impossible to keep up with or care about an ever-expanding cast of characters. I'm already ready to just give up and watch something else.

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Watchmen (2019)

8/10

Not what I was expecting but...

22 October 2019

I loved the Watchmen graphic novel and was extremely excited by the prospect of the television series based on those comics. As a result, I was initially very disappointed when I found so little that I recognised in episode 1. The characters aren't the same, the story's not the same, this is clearly not what I had hoped for. It is, however, very much in the spirit of the original Watchmen, exploring the zeitgeist and anxieties of our time. I think people complaining about it being "woke" are missing the point that the original series was left-leaning and focused on the social concerns of the late eighties. There is also an element of reductio ad absurda in the presentation of racial and gender issues, a certain hyperbole that is both appropriate to the comic book format (villains must be villainous, it requires moral certainty) that is also reflective. It's a beautifully presented fantasy, with great tension, strong writing, good acting, that takes a comic-book approach to exploring difficult issues and challenging perceptions. It'd be a mistake to take it too seriously or to miss the parallels with the original.

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Prodigal Son (2019– )

7/10

Highly derivative but not unenjoyable

27 September 2019

As somebody else said here, Thomas Harris should consider suing. There's no doubt that this show is trying to piggy-back on the success of Hannibal and that Tom Payne's troubled Malcolm Bright is a slim shadow of Hugh Dancy's edgier and more interesting Will Graham. Nevertheless, the production is slick, the writing is solid if patchy in places and the story moves along at a relatively good clip. It's not going to change your life but it's not a terrible way to spend an hour.

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Evil (2019–2024)

1/10

Ludicrous premise, terrible writing

27 September 2019

Warning: Spoilers

It's a bit sad seeing Mike Colter in this steaming pile of horse cookies. I don't even know where to start with it - the acting is wooden and desperate, the story is absurd and tedious, and the writing is just horrendous. As a taste, the heroine of the piece is married to an absent husband who is in Tibet leading tours up Everest because, of course he is, and the series starts in a courtroom where a trial is interrupted so a psychologist can test the defence's claim that their client is possessed by a Latin-speaking demon called Roy because that happens every day in the US. All of this is delivered with a pained, bunny-in-the-headlights diction from actors who must be wondering what happened to their career and what terrible crime brought them to this place. It's awful.

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Charmed (2018–2022)

1/10

So woke it's a parody of itself

22 October 2018

It's really hard to overstate how shockingly awful and charmless the first episode of this new series really is. The acting is wooden, the writing terrible and the story itself nonsensical. The show is clearly trying to position itself as a #metoo flagship, with power young women battling the forces of misogyny but it tries so hard that it is effectively satire. The monsters are literally demons of misogyny and sexual domination being overthrown to by feisty womanhood. It's patronizing rubbish that parodies and diminishes the very real struggles women face.

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Knightfall (2017–2019)

1/10

Dreary, trivial exploitative drivel passing itself as "historical"

6 December 2017

Warning: Spoilers

The series opens with Templar Knights escaping the siege of Acre with the Holy Grail, which is a real thing. There's some manly chest thrusting, lots of blood, some suitably villainous middle eastern types, a fair amount of bodice ripping... It's basically Dan Browne meets Mills & Boon with a little American bigotry thrown in for special effect. The acting is dire, the pacing poor, the story line forgettable. I suspect that they're trying to emulate the success of pseudo-historical products like Vikings with less money and a product-line approach to pumping out generic content. Whatever the excuse, it's unwatchable.

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Into the Badlands (2015–2019)

1/10

Ludicrous and awful

16 November 2015

Warning: Spoilers

The premise for this series is embarrassingly bad. After some kind of world war, seven barons take control of the world, outlaw firearms and train up armies of martial artists. Seriously. Starting from this completely ridiculous and unenforceable position, things spiral steadily downwards. Our main protagonist is a martial arts bad ass in a world full of morons. The incredibly silly fight scenes involve obliging villains who line up in order of expertise to be beaten, with the boss fighter carefully staying out of things only to die gorily once all the people could possibly have helped him have died gruesomely. Oh, yeah, and there's some kind of demon kid.

None of it makes sense. There's some cool CGI. The acting is bad. The story is incredibly silly.

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Bitten (2014–2016)

1/10

Fan service but little more

26 January 2014

Warning: Spoilers

The opening sequence in which a naked Laura Vandervoort and some dude have remarkably unerotic sex which is interrupted by her change into a werewolf pretty much sets the scene for this desultory fantasy. The sole selling point, it would seem, is that they've created a vehicle which requires Ms. V to strip at least three times an episode. You certainly wouldn't watch this show for the writing or the acting, which are both terrible, nor is the story in any way interesting. I would suggest that viewers interested in nudity and sex would do better to watch porn which is going to offer more skin without all the tedious, charmless preamble. The average grumble flick is definitely better scripted than this horror show. It is fairly obvious that the producers of Bitten are trying to emulate the success of True Blood, a fantasy genre that uses sex as a selling point, but, unlike Bitten, True Blood is beautifully written and produced and never, ever takes itself too seriously. By comparison, Bitten is humorless, predictable, boring and strays between very bad soap opera (think The Bold and the Beautiful) and penny-dreadful schlock fantasy. I am really hoping it will not be renewed because the only thing it has to offer is Laura Vandervoort's surgically adjusted charms and I am rather hoping that viewers want more than that.

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