Reviews

There are some occasionally funny moments in this series, and it's better than your average sitcom, but overall it's the same generic, soapy fluff, just masquerading as something more dark, raunchy and cynical.

Around the fifth episode, with the Cutter story-line, the series begins to fully devolve into most of the standard sitcom character archetypes, and story-line tricks and tropes with very little additional depth or originality.

As the standard assortment of bland, slapstick sitcom antics ensue, the jokes grow staler, and the remaining potential for something funnier or more original fades. The depictions of addiction are often cartoonish, with a thin veneer of realism.

Maintained a great buildup of suspense initially, but as the characters failed to progress beyond moronic, conventionally moralizing, two-dimensional caricatures (with the partial exception of George), and the conspiracy laden attack scenario is increasingly revealed (the allegory of a divided America), it became clear they wouldn't be able to stick the landing.

A plethora of ideas were tossed about, hidden symbols/Easter eggs and contrived character actions/plot points used to manufacture thin analogies while maintaining the building suspense, but it failed to coalesce into anything beyond a slop of tedious, half-baked metaphors by the, rather weak, ending of the film. Elements felt casually inserted (the animals for example) possibly because the writers thought they were interesting or cool, and vaguely symbolic, but with little narrative coherence, realism or depth beyond.

Much of this would be far less of an issue if other elements of the film were better. The cast was talented but little of the acting stood out, possibly because the characters rarely felt real or truly alive beyond flat stereotypes. Their actions often felt extreme and contrived, more so caricatures serving to re-emphasize the same assortment of shallow metaphors on technological reliance, media obsession, escapism, division, order vs. Chaos, but without the requisite level of realism to balance them out. Maybe this was even intentional, and they were meant to serve more so as extreme representations of these concepts as opposed to wholly realistic individuals. The bland, extremely surface level moralizing enhanced this sense of artificiality. Discussion and moral quandaries rarely progressed beyond simplistic and stereotypical. Perhaps this was also intentional.

This film seems oddly reminiscent of something created by artificial intelligence, a mashup of familiar plot-lines jammed together into an incongruous science-fiction and action genre hybrid that plays out in a fairly predictable and derivative manner. It's a paint-by-numbers creation providing intermittent moments of deja vu from the superior works it imitates.

The dramatic and emotional aspects feel more like the faded echos of something only distantly human. No single element is truly that terrible, but conversely nothing really stands out as truly great or particularly unique and creative. It only excels at forgettable mediocrity.

A waste of Adam Driver.

This documentary simply recycles and regurgitates the most popularized information regarding the case while failing to provide any new insights or credible expertise from an investigative or historical viewpoint.

What's perhaps worse, is that it's also riddled with the same pseudo-history and exaggerations which have been perpetuated for years surrounding the H. H. Holmes murder case, ever since its original coverage by the sensationalistic and hyperbolic yellow journalism of its era.

Further, Holmes isn't America's first serial killer, no matter how many times it's repeated online, or in tabloid rags and subpar documentaries. Just a few of the many potential contenders which predate Holmes include: The Harpe Brothers, Lydia Sherman (the Derby Poisoner), Thomas W. Piper (the Belfry Butcher), the Bender Family (the Bloody Benders)...

Russell Crowe carries much of the weight with his performance (I'm not a good judge of accents, so I can't comment on that aspect).

The film seems well budgeted, and many of the purely technical aspects are fairly good, but the writing is mostly by-the-numbers, an adequate but rather bland facsimile. It tries to pack in so much, but most of the material lacks anticipation or tension, while many of the possession scenes border on outright comedy.

It's hard to do something truly original. The real problem isn't imitation itself, but rather imitation which fails to truly elevate, enhance or stand out.

It may never have been one of the greatest shows on TV, but its early improvement and subsequent decline are among the most steep and extensive contrasts in quality I've seen from a comparably budgeted series, even more so than its predecessor. My rating would be lower if it weren't for a couple of those earlier seasons where, surprisingly, it really started to drastically improve.

I actually feel a little disgusted with myself for watching it as long as I have considering the unabashedly lazy and moronic depths it somehow managed to reach. Regardless, they'll probably create far worse spin-offs to keep milking the putrescent corpse of this rotting franchise.

I feel like the executives in charge of this franchise divined some dark equation and realized that investing far more time and talent into really trying to improve the writing of these spinoffs probably wouldn't earn a much greater long term profit. They may invest a bit more in production, CGI or VFX but they're not going to try recapturing any of that lightning in a bottle when they can just coast on the lingering nostalgia born from the creativity and talent of others from the past.

At this point most of the remaining but diminished base viewership will likely stick around, and each spinoff featuring older fan favorites as opposed to the generally poor and lazily written newer characters will also draw back some nostalgic former viewers hoping for a return to something better. Considering how utterly terrible some of the spinoffs and main series seasons have been over the last several years, many of these viewers will accept whatever bone they're tossed as long as it's not absolutely rotten, and even a fairly predictable and mediocre product like this will seem far better due to the comparison.

As long as this formula keeps turning a steady profit, why bother taking significant risks for quality when you can just keep churning out the same middling products as quickly as possible for a steady margin.

Come to think of it, this is probably just the standard model for most of Hollywood.