Reviews

Michael Connelly readers & devotees will be very distracted by this version of Haller-with-a foreign-accent. Maybe it was done to satisfy a demand for racial inclusivity? It's a bad decision not befitting an iconic and well-known character. Had to stop watching after 3 episodes.

Would "Bosch" be the same played by a native of Mumbai or Santiago?

Nice to see Neve Campbell on screen. Good supporting cast.

Can't figure out how Ramirez's character, a long-time Havana resident but USA born, initially a-political who flees Cuba & helps "rafters" get to US soil safely segues into working with terrorists setting bombs in Cuba. I think the movie crams too many characters & subplots into the allotted time. I figured out that the USA gov't is definitely a "bad guy" here but the rest of these people make little sense, to me. Many flashbacks & shifts in locations don't help.

Netflix must have been paid to take this mess.

A movie is often made by hopeful "producers" who then hustle it at film festivals like TIFF, Austin, Sundance, etc., hoping to attract a buyer who'll promote & distribute it. Many film fest entries never get to big screens. If nobody buys, the makers may want to recoup at least some of the investment, so they sell cheap to video & streaming services where unsuspecting viewers get sucked into watching.

It's sad to see actors like Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, & Adrian Pasdar stuck in this dreck. Maybe they really needed money or didn't realize how bad it would be.

Anne Hathaway is a reporter determined to investigate how US military surplus arms end up in Nicaragua. Rosie Perez is her colleague & pal, a photographer. Willem Dafoe, her father, asks for her help with a business deal. Throwing in a weak sub-plot, Anne as a single-mom who put her child in boarding school adds little. Ben Affleck is a politician. That's about all I could fathom from this disjointed story.

I'm very disappointed that Didion couldn't come up with a better screenplay based on her own novel (which I have not read.) I expected more - like an intelligible story line. Hathaway, Perez & Dafoe did their best. Affleck gave a flat-affect performance. Perhaps his character was written that way? Nice scenery.

An aside: this is the first time I've seen Hathaway without makeup to cover freckles I didn't know she had.

I wanted to like this, but between bipolarity, alcoholism, npd, ocd, grooming, class snobbery, etc., I quit watching halfway through ep. 5. The major characters are all so ill / damaged / dysfunctional that I didn't care anymore what happened to any of them. The drinking & acting-out by the male lead skater made it unrealistic that he'd consistently skate at a very high level. The female skating is nice but not AAA.

Purists complain that this deviates too far from "the book." Yes it probably does but I read the 1000 page "Pillars of the Earth" 30 years ago & don't remember enough of it to care. Watching this 10 years after the first mini-series is entertaining enough. Good to excellent cast, except for Cynthia Nixon who's badly miscast & chewed the scenery too hard. Sets, costumes & cinematography are very good. Action, romance, religion, superstition, murder, politics, war (several kinds), pestilence - it's all here, loosely framed around historic events.