Reviews

I've been a fan of Godzilla films for as long as I can remember, but this one I long regarded as one of the worst of the Showa era films. Because of it, I hadn't seen it in decades before I decided to give it a rewatch after seeing for the first time the original Japanese version, which I enjoyed enormously.

The differences are distinct enough to be noteworthy. Perhaps the greatest of them is the commentary on the impact of consumer culture and television that infuses the original version, as the former is muted while the latter practically disappears. This in some ways makes for a more straightforward narrative n the first part, as the jumping between the Godzilla and Kong discovery plots is streamlined: Godzilla is discovered first, and only then do we get to the expedition to Faro Island and the introduction of Kong to the tale.

What advantages are derived from this, however, are more than offset by the cuts made to smooth out the narrative. These come at the cost of character development, something I didn't appreciate as much as a kid waiting to see the next kaiju battle in the movie but which I now appreciate for the value it brings to the story as a whole. And that is why this film will always remain more a curiosity for me than a treasured classic. Anyone who wants to watch this movie would be better served seeking out the Japanese version, with this one best regarded as an artifact demonstrating how American producers mistakenly believed Japanese media needed to be altered to suit better the interests of an American audience.

I've been a fan of "The Fugitive" ever since I first saw it in the theaters, and it's one of those movies I always have been drawn into whenever I came across it on cable or streaming. It's not as though I need to at this point, as so much of the film's strengths stand out crisply in my memory: the train wreck, the standoff in the spillway, the St. Patrick's Day pursuit, and the final standoff between Richard Kimble and the man who betrayed him. That they remain so clear and enjoyably recalled is a testament to the quality of one of the great action films of the 1990s, and an iconic film of the suspense genre.

By contrast, this film stands out less in my memory. This is probably because I've rewatched it far less, which speaks in part to its lower profile. While I see "The Fugitive" frequently on the shelves of used media stores and I had no problem finding a copy to check out from my local library when I wanted to revisit it, this one took some searching before I found a used DVD of the movie in the snap case that Warner Brothers used for their releases back then. Granted, I could have streamed it, but I wanted a little of the throwback experience when watching it so as to help me remember why it's so unmemorable.

Well, I won't have a problem remembering it now. Because rewatching it has cemented in my mind just how profoundly stupid of a movie this is. And the tragedy of this is that there is so much about it that is worth liking. It's a film that's grounded in the character of Sam Gerard, and given that Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for his performance in the first film, it's easy to understand why they did so. And Jones delivers a performance every bit as enjoyable as the first one. It's easy to like his gruff-but-caring deputy marshal, and his interaction with his team (nearly all of whom returned for the sequel, with one exception that's a little problematic) is as much a strength of this film as it was the first one.

And the performances around it are no less satisfying. Just as he does in every other performance of his, Robert Downey Jr. Brings his "A" game to the film. Kate Nelligan, Patrick Malahide and Michael Paul Chen are almost tragically underused in their supporting roles. And Wesley Snipes is at his peak as an intense action hero evading custody while unraveling the conspiracy behind his crime.

Yet therein lies the core problem with this movie. Though Snipes doing what he does as Mark Warner/Roberts/Sheridan, it feels like an outlier from the rest of the movie. Whereas everyone else is recognizably human, Snipes is effectively a superhero who can effortlessly slip out of manacles and dragnets, heal superhumanly fast from injuries, pummel trained agents, and swing off tall buildings to escape on the top of moving trains. There's certainly none of the suspense that comes from watching Ford evade capture, as Snipes always has the exact ability he needs to overcome every obstacle he faces.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Snipes's character receives Gerard's sympathy at an early stage. But exactly what he's done to deserve this remains a mystery. Sure, Gerard notes that Mark W/R/S is going out of his way to avoid killing people, but that still means he's terrorizing civilians, injuring law enforcement offers, and even at one point shooting Gerard himself in the chest. Yet the marshal who once said in response to a declaration of innocence that he didn't care now seems to believe that his quarry may not be a bad guy like the other fugitives he pursues, even as he's nursing the wound he received from being shot by him. Clearly Gerard's experiences with Kimble have endowed him with the forgiveness of a saint.

It takes that level to give Snipes's character a pass on his actions. Supposedly he was supposed to be an outright antagonist who was morphed into another innocent fugitive after unfavorable test screenings. That would certainly explain his character's conduct throughout the movie, which is closer to that of a self-centered antagonist than a sympathetic protagonist. Nothing exemplifies that better than his treatment of his girlfriend Marie, whom he gets to commit multiple crimes on his behalf. Yet instead of serving as a demonstration of Mark W/R/S's corruption, it's all hand-waved away as justified in the cause of "righteousness." Any more righteous, and Snipes would have raised accusations of repeating his performance as Simon Phoenix.

All of this is why it's difficult to maintain sympathy for Snipes's character long enough to get to the late reveal of his innocence. Instead we're left to see Gerard suffering needlessly for little more than the purpose of moving the story forward. It's a waste of not just his character but the others, all of whom deserve to be in a better story than this. Only thanks to the understandably underwhelming performance of this movie, they would never receive another chance to do so. Thus a promising premise for a franchise featuring an enjoyable character dies prematurely. What a waste.

The origin of this revenge fantasy isn't hard to imagine. My guess is that the writer (whose track record in recent years consists largely of writing scripts for completely unnecessary remakes of great action films) was persuaded to give money to a Nigerian prince or invest in NFTs, and decided to get payback by making them the villains of an action piece. Only having Jason Statham beat up a bunch of crypto bros seemed like an unequal contest, so he needed to up the stakes - with extreme prejudice.

Thus we get a film in which a bunch of suspiciously well-organized scammers clean a sweet old lady (played by Mrs. Huxtable herself, so you know she's pure goodness) out of her life's savings. Unbeknownst to them, she rents out her barn to a beekeeper who decides to take revenge. Only he's not just a beekeeper, but a retired "Beekeeper", a former member of an ultra-secret elite extralegal organization created to maintain "balance in the system" by any means necessary, provided those means are violent ones. What could possibly be wrong with that?

And with one phone call to his former employer, ex-Beekeeper Statham (his character has some typically generic name that is utterly unmemorable) gets needed information that federal law enforcement has been unable to obtain for years. And with it he begins to work his way up the chain to the very top, brushing aside with casual indifference challenges that would stymie anyone else. Armed thugs, SWAT teams, and ex-Special Forces operative are shrugged off with just a few moves. Injuries that would immobilize or even kill lesser people are mere annoyances to him, handled with a grunt and an application of a piece of cloth to some random part of his body. T-800s would envy such durability.

More concerning is the recurring condition from which Beekeeper Statham has suffered that has caused him to internalize both his title and his pastime, to the point where every conversation with him degenerates into a series of beekeeping metaphors. Evidently this is a viral illness, as others he comes into contact with or who even learn of his existence soon spout the same inane analogies. With it comes a sort of resigned acceptance that all this murder and property destruction is necessary to protect "the hive." At this point Mrs. Huxtable has been forgotten five crimes scenes ago save by her daughter, who happens to be an FBI agent and who manages to figure out everything with the help of a beekeeping manual. Yes, it's like that.

To be fair, if you like this sort of thing it's not the worst movie in the world. The "system" is saved, bad guys get their just desserts, and Beekeeper Statham lives to beekeep in the sequel (if any of this constitutes a spoiler to you, welcome to action films). The greatest crime on display in it, though, isn't the scamming or the murder or the property destruction, but the utter waste of acting talent, as several award-winning thespians are asked to do little more than deliver their lines on the way to cashing their checks. The only one who really threatens to run away with the movie is Josh Hutcherson, who plays a classier version of Donald Trump Junior with a degree of panache that threatens to make the movie fun. But then David Ayer's questionable camera angles and his need to showcase Statham's evident case of facial paralysis intervene to ensure that he does not prove to be the true hero of the movie by saving it from the tedium of predictability. But hey, at least scammers will think twice about scamming lest a Beekeeper gets them, right?

I avoided watching this movie for a long time. Part of the reason why was my belief that a remake of John Milius's Cold War classic was not only unnecessary, but pointless. The reports about the production problems didn't help, while the delay in its release underscored the sense that this movie was a bad idea. Eventually, though, I decided to give it a chance. And even with my lowered expectations, I was disappointed. It didn't help to see such a great cast wasted. How someone could take actors with the caliber of Chris Hemsworth, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Adrianne Palicki, and Josh Hutcherson - to name just the most prominent ones - and still produce such a lousy film is truly amazing.

To me the problem is not that the movie was insufficiently faithful to the source material. If anything, it was too faithful. Too often I found myself watching scenes that were little more than inferior imitations of ones from the original movie. If the producers really wanted to remake the film, they needed to do more to justify its existence than adding an annoying teen romance subplot and a MacGuffin hunt that was utterly devoid of narrative interest. You can add this to the long list of examples of why remakes more often than not are a waste of money and effort. It certainly doesn't help when the filmmakers completely miss what it was that made the first film so memorable.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Perry Mason character in the television show is the scope of his practice. Though primarily known as a criminal defense attorney, his cases range from incorporations to patent cases. It's the latter that he's engaged in at the start of the episode, as he has taken on two clients suing over a patent. And as usually the case, Perry Mason is crushing it in the courtroom.

Desperate to turn their failing case around, the defendants try a desperate gambit by dredging up a drunken sailor who happens to look like the legendary lawyer. This gives Burr a rare chance to play a dual role in the show and he embraces it with gusto. His Grimes is a raspy and disheveled mess, played so over the top that the ham in Burr's makeup is on display. It's fun, but at times it gets in the way of one of the better plots in the show's final season, one that features a fun amount of intrigue on all sides.

Leverage's first season finale opens with an inversion of the first scene from the previous episode, "The First David Job," with I. Y. S. Insurance C. E. O. Ian Blackpoole holding a gun to Nathan Ford. Three months have passed since Blackpoole and Jim Sterling successfully thwarted the Leverage crew's attempt to con Blackpoole and forced the team to scatter. Now, with Blackpoole's wing about to open the crew reunites to seek revenge. With Blackpoole and Sterling expecting another attempt on the two models of Michaelangelo's David statue now in Blackpoole's possession, the team decides their best option is to recruit an inside person: Maggie Collins, Nate's ex-wife and a key I. Y. S. Employee. But doing so requires mending broken relationships - both between Nate and Maggie and between a team damaged by a member's betrayal.

This is an important episode for a number of reasons. Most immediately, it resolves the elements of the arc hinted at over the course of the season, establishing a pattern for the season finales for the rest of the series' run. Perhaps even more importantly, Nate's achievement of some long-needed catharsis for the emotional trauma of the loss of his son, which allows the show to take his character in new directions in the seasons to come. It does this while at the same time providing an extremely satisfying and seemingly impossible resolution. It's a plotting challenge made even more so by Blackpoole's and Sterling's anticipation of the team's attempt (thus making it all the more difficult to pull off any con) AND the principle maintained throughout the show that "Sterling never loses." To accomplish all of this in the course of a single episode is no small feat, and while some compromises are inevitably made in the process (the fallout from Sophie's actions receives far less attention than it should), that the show does this in what is a highly entertaining episode makes this by far the most enjoyable of the series' season finales.

Haters hate this film all you want. It proved ideal riffing material for Mike, Bill, and Kevin. They suffered so that we have the film the only way it should be seen: with an overlay of humorous commentary about the momentary success and enduring lameness of Robert Van Winkle.

Under Nathan Ford's leadership, the Leverage crew helped numerous clients fight back against the rich and powerful. While this brought its team members personal growth and moral satisfaction, it did little to heal Nate's ongoing pain over the loss of his son. Though he prided himself on being a functioning alcoholic, Nate's drinking at times created problems in the middle of cases (most notably in "The 12 Step Job"), jeopardizing the con and worse. With Nate's personal issues putting the team's safety at risk, the others decide that something needed to be done.

Instead of rehab, however, the team offers Ford a chance to revenge himself against the man who denied his son the treatment that could have saved his life. That man was Ian Blackpoole, the president and C. E. O. Of Ford's former employer, I. Y. S. Taking advantage of Blackpoole's interest in art, the team sets up a con involving two bronze models of Michaelangelo's famous sculpture David made by the artist himself. The plan is to sell him a copy of one of the models (stolen from the Vatican a decade before) to compliment the one Blackpoole owns and plans on displaying at a new wing he financed at a local art museum. When Blackpool insists on having his own art expert, Maggie Collins - Nate's ex-wife - authenticate the model, the team is forced to improvise a theft of the one Blackpoole owns - and this soon proves not to be the only complication facing the team.

The decision to wrap up Leverage's first season with a multi-part climactic story established a pattern that would become a hallmark for the show. This one was arguably the best of the five, in part because the elements within it are so personal for Ford. Nor does it hurt that fan-favorite nemesis Jim Stirling makes an appearance, or that there's an additional twist late in the episode that increases the level of personal drama involved. It also helps, though, that the climactic story did not involve the elaborate season-long set-up that the show would resort to in later seasons, which had the effect of burdening many of the episodes with more exposition than the best episodes deserved. Here it's built upon more subtle developments, and with a level of emotional entanglement that is far more effective than the more overt threats resorted to later in the series' run.

When they began operating as a team, hacker extraordinaire Alec Hardison created a number of different aliases for the Leverage crew for use in their cons. The quality of his work becomes evident when one of Parker's aliases receives a summons for jury duty. After Parker goes rogue on a con, Nathan Ford decides that service on a jury would serve as a valuable learning opportunity about working on a team - something with which Parker still has trouble. Parker soon discovers, however, that what is on the surface an innocuous wrongful death civil trial involving an energy supplement is being manipulated by Tobey Earnshaw, the heiress to a major pharmaceutical company. Determined to avoid any liability for a product in which she invested without the company's knowledge, Earnshaw undertakes an aggressive operation to win the case by manipulating the jury. What she doesn't count on, though, is the intervention of the Leverage team.

What follows is staged as a chess match, with Nate and company trying to win a favorable outcome for the plaintiff. With the trial already underway, Nate concludes his only option is to force a settlement, which Earnshaw has ruled out. While Parker tries to ingratiate herself with the other jurors and Hardison and Eliot Spenser investigate which jury members Earnshaw has bribed, Sophie poses as an Indian pharmaceutical executive to convince the trial's defendant, supplement company owner William Quint, to go against Earnshaw and settle the case in order to gain a better buyout than Earnshaw is offering him. They soon discover that they face a forceful and determined mark, who will do whatever it takes in order to guarantee a favorable verdict.

The moves and countermoves between the two sides is just one of the enjoyable aspects of this standout episode. It's aided enormously by the guest performances, particularly Lauren Holly's as the calculating Earnshaw, and Brent Spiner's as supplement company owner William Quint. Yet it's Beth Riesgraf who makes it all work as well as it does. In the first episode centered around Parker she proves more than up to the task of delivering the performance viewers came to expect while at the same time developing her as a character in ways that pay off over the course of the series. It helps to make the episode the best of the first season, one that is a great example of the show firing on all its cylinders.

I must confess that I'm a latecomer to enjoying the pleasures of this show. While I have yet to watch every episode, this one might well end up as my all-time favorite. It may not be the best episode or the most emotionally affecting, but it is easily the most fun of all of them.

It begins with a premise that many viewers have no doubt asked themselves at various points in the show, namely: why don't the many marks who have been conned by Mickey Stone's crew ever seek revenge? Enter Carlton Woods and Harry Fielding, the two slimy businessmen who were the targets in the "New Recruits" episode earlier in the series. Still smarting from their humiliation, they assemble (how they do it is perhaps the best joke of the entire episode) a collection of people who have all been swindled by Mickey and company. Their plan is an incredibly simple one: get Stone and his team to try to pull a con on someone, then walk away after the "convincer" - the point at which the mark has the bait - leaving the team out of a substantial sum of money. With the financial backing of his league of scumbags Woods gets his old school friend Alfie Baron (played as an upper-class twit by Tom Goodman-Hill in a performance that veers a little too far into caricature) to pose as a greedy investor willing to help launder dirty money - a mark too tempting for the grifters not to target.

What follows is akin to a chess match in which one side is convinced he knows in advance all of his opponent's moves and how to counter them in order to win the game. And while it's probably not a spoiler to say that things don't turn out the way Woods and Fielding plan they will, it's nonetheless enormously enjoyable to see things play out, right up to a highly satisfying denouement that is all the more entertaining for Adam James's numerous readings of the word "arse." It's hard to imagine ever getting tired of watching such an entertaining episode, with a cast and crew that are all at the top of their game.

While the majority of Leverage's run consisted of stand-alone episodes, each season had an arc that developed over its course. The arc of the first season could be described as "healing Nathan Ford," over which the broken man introduced in the first episode drowning his sorrows in a hotel bar gradually comes to terms with the horrific loss he has suffered. In most of the episodes of the season, the arc is in the background, and in most episodes is reflected in Nate's nonstop drinking.

In this episode, however, Ford's problems take center stage thanks to their case. Their mark is money manager Jack Hurley, an addict whose loose management of a food bank's funds brings him to their attention. After tracking Hurley down, Nate decides to enroll him at a rehabilitation clinic as a way of getting him to open up about the location of the missing money. With Nate and Parker both posing as patients, they soon find themselves experiencing treatment for their problems. While Parker responds positively (in what serves as much more casual of a subplot than it deserves), Nate finds himself coping far less successfully with alcohol withdrawal, which Sophie (who is posing as a therapist) uses to get him to confront his problems.

This ends up becoming the emotional focus of the episode, thanks to an intense and showy performance from Timothy Hutton. It also eclipses the attempt to recover the missing funds, which has Eliot and Hardison dealing with rival gangs who are chasing Hurley for money that he stole from them. Though this part is resolved by the end, it is much less momentous than the development of Nate's character or the progress it makes towards the season's conclusion. It makes for one of the most important episodes of the season, though in the end not one of the best ones.

One of the underappreciated aspects of Leverage was its relevancy to its times. For all of its light-hearted tone and its comedic elements, its plots were often premised on real-life scams and criminal activity. There are few better examples of this than "The Snow Job," which opens with a National Guardsman, Wayne Scott, and his family having their home foreclosed because of their failure to pay their contractor for the shoddy work done to their house - only to have that same contactor, Henry Retzig, then buy the house from the bank. It's a premise that was inspired by the activities of construction companies in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, who used a similar crooked-but-legal approach to defraud their victims of their property.

Sympathizing with the plight of an honest man fighting for his family, Nate takes their case. Targeting Henry's dim-witted son Randy, the team succeeds without too much difficulty in conning the family out of the money owed to the Scotts. When Nate discovers that they aren't the only victims of the Retzigs' operation, however, he decides abruptly to take their entire company instead. The scam is complicated not only by a state police investigation that threatens to ensnare them along with the Retzigs, but Nate's own alcohol-fueled impulsiveness, which prompts the team's concern that he is spiraling out of control - and that he will drag them down as well.

Nate's recklessness injects an extra element of drama to what is overall an entertaining episode. It's also one that benefits from having a trio of marks off of whom to play, with the team working their way from Randy to Henry to Dennis, Henry's other son and the brains behind their operation. The three make for an interesting mix, and the actors involved (two of whom - Sam Anderson and Danny Strong - are familiar to fans of the Buffy/Angel TV series) do a nice job of capturing the family chemistry that is key to the scam's outcome. Though it's not one of the best episodes of the season, "The Snow Job" is a nice, solid episode of a show that by this point had found its stride.

"The Mile High Job" begins with one of the most awkward openings of the entire series. After a brief client meeting/introduction to the case, the show cuts to the team breaking into the offices of an agricultural company named Genogrow to find the evidence that its fertilizer killed a young girl. Yet the break-in is a clumsy affair, as the team is working around the unexplained absence of Alec Hardison and has to cope with the electronic security without him. It's a fun set-up but it's awkwardly done, especially as the entire team - Hardison included - is present at the client meeting. Are we really to expect that Hardison would leave the team in the lurch knowing that they had a job in progress?

Nevertheless, the separation proves key to the plot, in which the team is forced once again to improvise in a hurry. During the break-in they discover the agricultural company's CEO is preparing to scramble any attempt to investigate the deaths by "bankrupting" the division involved with the fertilizer (thus creating a ticking-clock scenario, even if the details don't make any sense) and dealing with the "assets" which are on a flight shortly to leave for the Cayman Islands. After an entertaining sequence in which Nate, Sophie, Eliot, and Parker establish roles for themselves while they're in the airport (which includes a cute nod to Doctor Who) they infiltrate the flight and begin sorting through the passengers and searching their carry-on luggage.

Meanwhile Hardison is tasked with re-infiltrating Genogrow on his own in order to find the evidence that the team was looking for during their original break-in. This gives Aldis Hodge a chance to flex his acting skills Gina Bellman-style with a couple of performances that allow him to pose as a corporate drone. He's the MVP of the episode in this regard, as it gives him his best opportunity yet to demonstrate his ability to switch between an overtly comedic performance and the more standard dramedic one typically required by the show. That Hodge does it so effortlessly is an element that the show would exploit further in future seasons.

It turns out the flight is a whole set up that leaves the team in mortal danger. It's not a spoiler to say that they get out of it in the end, which they do in suitably dramatic style. And while it involves a lot more CGI than a television show in 2009 should be employing given its poor quality, it's another reflection of the show's willingness to go big in service to an entertaining tale. While another draft of the script could have smoothed out some of the bumps in the plot and the structure, even without one it's still a solidly entertaining episode that showcases why the Leverage crew is the best at what they do.

Television shows are often defined by two distinct schedules: the order in which episodes are filmed, and the order in which they are shown. The former matters in terms of the main cast learning their characters and developing them over the course of the show, while the latter matters in terms of how the developments are presented to the viewer. With a largely episodic show such as Leverage, the latter matters less, which gave the TNT network which originally aired the show an opportunity to rearrange some of the episodes to show them in the way they thought best. And while it works, little clues can crop up that expose the shuffling that took place.

"The Wedding Job" is one of the more obvious examples of this. It's an early example of a recurring theme of "the team versus the mob," as the crew takes on Nicky Moscone, a mob boss who pressures a restaurant owner to take the fall for murdering a rival. With the owner's family in need of the money Moscone promised but never provided, the team goes undercover as staff for the upcoming wedding of Moscone's daughter to steal it. The setting proves an effective introduction to Eliot's skills as a chef (one of the better recurring elements of the series) and a more awkward vehicle for exploring Nate and Sophie's relationship.

That exploration seems as though it comes out of nowhere, given that the two of them were getting along nicely in the previous episodes. It's just one of the clues that this episode was meant to be aired earlier than it was. Another is a conversation midway through the episode between Eliot and Hardison in which Eliot mentions a relationship in his past that is almost certainly the one with featured in "The Two-Horse Job," yet it's introduced as though it's unknown to Hardison. And finally there's the inclusion of agents Taggert and McSweeten, the clueless FBI agents who serve as intermittent comic relief for the rest of the series. If they look familiar it's because they appeared at the end of "The Bank Shot Job," in a cameo that would have made more sense had this episode preceded it.

While the reordering doesn't seriously detract from the story, it is one of the weaker episodes of the first season. It's especially unfortunate given the caliber of the guest stars in it. Foremost among them is Dan Lauria, who hardly needs to exert himself to play the episode's mark. He is more than ably assisted by Nicole Sullivan, who makes the most of the momozilla caricature the story requires her to play. And while Andrew Divoff is largely wasted as the Russian mobster doing business with Moscone, this is more than offset by Anthony De Longis's performance as "the butcher of Kiev" (seriously, that's the only name he gets in the episode). Though they and the cast all put in solid performances, they can only do so much with the material they have. The result is a subpar episode, albeit one that still makes for entertaining viewing.

Like any show Leverage is one that had its high points and its low ones. "The Stork Job" is one of the latter, and is probably the least-impressive episode of the first season. It's unfortunate given its ambitions, as it's the first one in which the team goes abroad, in this case to Serbia. Their mark is Irina Larenko, a former model and actress who is running a scam with local mobster Nicholas Obrovic using a fake adoption agency. Having bilked an American couple of over a hundred thousand dollars, the crooks provide them with a young boy named Luca only to reclaim him a week later. It's a premise that justifies the team's involvement, yet why Irina and Nicholas need Luca back - especially when it's later revealed that they have a whole room full of orphans - is never adequately explained.

As a foster child the case quickly proves a personal one for Parker, and results in some actions that are even more erratic than usual from her. But while Beth Riesgraf does a good job of selling her character's personal turmoil, she isn't helped by a plot that causes her to take wildly-varied actions - first planning to abandon the kids, then risking herself to save them all. The latter becomes an imperative for the team once they discover that the adoption scam is merely a sideline for much more dangerous illegal activities. This increases the stakes for the team, but it seems an unnecessarily escalation designed more as an excuse to inject some action scenes than anything else and it demonstrates the limits to their willingness to deviate from the show's formula.

To be fair, the episode is not without its merits. As usual the actors do a good job with their roles, with Riesgraf in particular getting an opportunity to develop her emotionally stunted character. There's also a fun scene early on in which Nate and Sophie simultaneously coach Eliot and Parker through initial encounters with the marks, and the team's hijacking of an independent horror film for their scam gives Timothy Hutton a chance for a showy performance as a director. Yet in the end the cast can only do so much to enliven a poorly-plotted story, one that the muted visual tones of the "Serbian" setting do little to help. It's an early misfire that stands out especially when compared to the much stronger "The Bank Shot Job" that preceded it, in which the changes were all for the better. Fortunately it did little to discourage other, even more successful experimental episodes later on in the show.

One of the things that makes Leverage such a fun show to watch is the premise of each episode, which has its team of supremely talented criminals taking down despicable bad guys. An important factor in the show's success, though, was its willingness from the start to fiddle with that premise in ways to keep the episodes creatively fresh. The comparison here is with the classic Mission: Impossible TV series from the 1960s which is one of the show's most obvious ancestors. After an inaugural season with a variety of storylines, M:I settled into three seasons of episodes that largely followed a predictable formula of set-ups and takedowns, with more consistent efforts to vary the standardized plots only coming with their attempt to refresh the show in the fifth season.

By contrast, the fifth episode of Leverage begins with the climax of a con. The mark is a corrupt small-town judge whom the team had convinced to turn over to them a large sum of money. As he accompanies the judge to the town's bank to withdraw the cash, Nathan Ford notices two men acting suspiciously. The men are there to rob the place, and when Nate stops to protect Sophie (who is posing as an account manager) the three of them are trapped in the bank when the robbery begins. With Nate and Sophie in trouble, the rest of the team is forced to improvise in order to work out the meaning of the robbers' odd behavior and avert a catastrophic showdown.

Shaking things up allows the show to maintain its narrative tension and to keep the audience guessing. It's also a great way to highlight the characters' creativity, as the team is forced to adapt on the fly to circumstances they didn't anticipate. It makes for a suspenseful episode, especially when the situation spirals out of control and exposes the team to the mark. The episode benefits in this regard from the casting of Michael O'Neill as the corrupt Judge Roy. A character actor with a long resume full of law enforcement roles, he is clearly relishing a turn as the heel and plays the part to perfection. It makes for one of the best episodes of the first season, and serves as an early demonstration of the variations viewers would see in the seasons to come.

This is an episode that doesn't quite come together the way that it should. It begins very promisingly, with Nathan Ford taking up the cause of an old friend named Father Paul, a Catholic priest (played by guest star D. B. Sweeney) whose parish church is targeted for annexation by a ruthless real estate developer. It's an interesting choice, not just for the glimpse it gives viewers into Ford's life (we learn that he was at one point in seminary), but that we have the first case of a reluctant client: Sweeney's priest knows Ford well enough to doubt his methods.

Events soon justify Father Paul's skepticism. Unlike the first three episodes, when the cons the teams execute generally go to plan, the show gives us the first case of one that spirals out of control. In this instance, the plan to stage a miracle that would save the church works too well, it does little to deter the property developer, who instead moves to exploit it as the new centerpiece of a reenvisioned development. Worse, the miracle draws the attention of the Vatican, which launches an investigation that will end with Father Paul's defrocking. Backed into a corner, the team has little choice but to try for a last-minute scheme to get Nate's friend off the hook - and hopefully save the church in the process.

And it's here that all of the elements fail to gel. This is ultimately an issue with the writing, as the climax relies too much upon coincidence and a confession that seems more coincidental and opportunistic than planned. It makes for an unsatisfying ending to what is otherwise a fun episode in which everyone in the team does their thing, additional insight is provided into one of the main characters, and the first seeds of the season's resolution are sown for the viewer.

The third episode of Leverage begins with a simple con. After a Wall Street investor named Alan Foss burns down his stable of underperforming horses for the insurance money, his trainer Willie Martin enlists the team's help to gain ownership of the last surviving horse and to get Foss out of the horse racing business. The con is a rigged card game in which the team succeeds in getting Foss to sign over the horse. Their success is soon blunted, though, by the appearance of Jim Sterling, Nate Ford's old partner at the insurance company where he used to work and someone who is every bit as clever and calculating. With Sterling seeking to blame the trainer for the fire, the team has to devise a new plan to shut down Foss permanently while ensuring that Martin doesn't take the fall for his actions.

This episode is notable for a couple of reasons. The first of these is its incorporation of Eliot Spencer's past into the plot. This is the first appearance of a device that the show's writers would use over the course of the series, as doing so became an effective way of both adding to the emotional stakes while simultaneously supplying a little backstory about the central characters. This comes across most effectively in Eliot's interaction with Aimee Martin, Willie's daughter and Eliot's former sweetheart. It helps that Jamie Ray Newman is good in her role, as she demonstrates that for all of the ability of the show's main cast an episode needed good actors against whom to play off for best effect.

And whereas the previous episode "The Homecoming Job" demonstrated this in the negative by having less-than-commanding actors playing the antagonists, it more than makes up for this not just with Newman but with two other excellent guest stars. As the obnoxious Foss, Rick Hoffman foreshadows his brilliant performance as Louis Litt in Suits, making his character one whose comeuppance is so richly desirable that it's even better for coming twice in the episode. Yet it's Sterling who's the episode's true antagonist, and Mark Sheppard nails the scheming arrogance that made his character so plausible as a perennial foil for the team. Taken together, it makes for the sort of enjoyable and suspenseful caper that would soon become standard for the series.

Though this is the second episode of "Leverage" it's the first one that establishes the template for a "standard" episode of the show: beginning with a clip showing the injustice suffered by the client, we see him making his case to team leader Nate Ford as to why he needs their help. In this case, it's a soldier who was crippled in a firefight in Iraq caused by a team of shady private military contractors. Moved by the case, Nate has hacker extraordinaire Alec Hardison send the Leverage signal to assemble the team.

After a brief reintroduction to the rest of the team - grifter Sophie Deveraux, hitter Eliot Spencer, and thief Parker - they meet up at their new home in Los Angeles. From there we discover the marks: Blackwater Castleman Security CEO Charles Dufort and his pet congressman, Robert Jenkins. Quickly the Leverage team realize that there's more to the case than the shooting, as Dufort and working together to smuggle something big into the company - something that they're willing to kill in order to conceal.

Apart from the fact that this episode sets the basic patterns of an episode for the majority of the series, it's something of a step down from the pilot. Part of the problem is with the antagonists, both of whom are played by veteran actors with long resumes. Unfortunately, while Robert Pine - a familiar face from his longtime role as the duty sergeant in "CHiPs" - does a nice job playing a smarmy pol, Richard Cox is pretty forgettable as Dufort. This foreshadows what would become the show's Achilles' heel, demonstrating that without a compelling foil the story suffers. Fortunately the chemistry between the leads remains solid, while the action is staged well enough to maintain a degree of excitement throughout the episode. The result may not rank among the best of the season, but it's a solid entry and a good early example of what would prove a successful formula.

Pilots for television shows are part proof-of-concept, part half-refined idea. Often developed as a testing ground for a proposed series, they reflect the ideas and characters at their rawest, before the actors perfect their chemistry with one another and the writers develop for the audience the backstories and personal details that make the characters into the familiar faces that they become over the course of its run.

One of the things that makes the "Leverage" so notable is how so many of the elements that would characterize the show were already well developed from the start. As the pilot, the premise is unique to the show: Nathan Ford, a former insurance investigator, is hired by an airline executive to supervise a team of criminals he brought together to steal back a set of plans from one of his rivals. Each of the specialists the executive hired - a computer hacker, a thief, and a hitter - is known for two things: being the best at what they do and their reputation for working alone; Ford's job is to manage them as a team and keep them honest. The job that plays out both serves as the audience's introduction to the characters, both in terms of their roles and their distinctive personalities. Then, with the job completed, they part ways, never to meet again.

All of that takes place in the first quarter of the episode. The rest of it involves the discovery of hidden motives, a double-cross, and the team working to get revenge. It's over the remaining two-thirds of the show that we see the team not just working together, but coming together as a team, as they learn how to trust one another for the long term. It's here where we see the elements that would come to characterize a "Leverage" episode: the set-up of the con, the adaptation to complications, and the pay-off. Watching it unfold makes for great viewing, and it especially helps to have an actor of Saul Rubinek's caliber playing the foil, as his combination of intelligence and duplicitousness makes him for both a formidable challenger and an especially enjoyable downfall.

By the end of the pilot all of the elements that would characterize the show - the sharp writing, the character relationships, the late-episode twists and the final payoff - have been demonstrated in a way that would be repeated numerous times in the episodes to come. It's a particularly effective formula that would be refined and played with with over the five seasons that followed, proving adaptable enough to work through a number of variations. It's a testament to all of the work that went into its development that not only does it work as a great introduction to the show, but it also stands as one of its best episodes. That's not something that can always be said for even the greatest shows in television history, and it shows how they got it all right from the start.