Change Your Image
elbiggus
Reviews
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Well at least it knows it sucks, I guess...
The original J&SB movie was flawed but entertaining, but this is... well, it's awful. It acts like it's a satire of reboots, but there's a difference between satirising something and actually just being the thing, and this is firmly the latter. The jokes are weak, the acting is weaker, the cameos feel strained beyond breaking point, and the whole thing is painful to watch. No idea what happened to Kevin Smith, but he shouldn't be allowed to make movies any more; he's made a couple of genuine classics, a couple of near misses, and a whole pile of steaming stinkers, and this particular dropping is the crowning glory. Heck, it's even worse than Jersey Girl.
Go 8 Bit (2016)
How hard can it be?
I'm sure video game-based TV used to be good (or at the very least watchable) but it seems as the medium has advanced, TV's ability to do something good with it has all but vanished and this panel-show-cum- car-crash perhaps marks a new record low.
The format is similar to The Generation Game, but messy or complex activities that have scope for comical failures have been replaced with video game-related challenges so instead of watching some unwitting member of the public performing some highly-skilled task with no preparation with the potential for emergent slapstick comedy we get to watch a celebrity playing a game. Sometimes they're OK at it, sometimes they're not, but the result is either dull or annoying -- there are no impressive skills to marvel at, and there are no comic consequences of failure.
The resident team captains seem to have little or no experience with or connection to games and their purpose on the show is somewhat unclear, the audience voting does nothing but pad the running time, the host/co-host banter is painfully unfunny, and the fact that everyone involved seems to pander to the "games players are generally sad and pathetic loners" is just the rancid icing on the stale cake.
It's a shame, really, as Dara O'Briain is usually pretty funny and from his appearances on other shows he also seems to be a bit of a gamer so I was hoping for something worthwhile, but alas it was not to be. Stick on some old episodes of Bad Influence! or Gamesmaster, or re-watch Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe instead...
Community (2009)
Who knew post-modernism could be so funny?
On paper this sounds like a fairly run of the mill proposition -- take a mismatched group of misfits at a chaotic community college, and highjinks ensue -- but by playing with genre tropes it elevates itself well beyond the ordinary, and is perhaps one of the funniest sitcoms I've seen in many years. While the principal characters have an element of two dimensionality -- "the cool one", "the repressed one", "the weird geek", "the dumb jock", etc. -- they're brilliantly written and avoid becoming clichés, and the humour treads a broad path from simple slapstick and farce to a complex and almost surreal postmodern self-deconstruction: this is a sitcom that acknowledges it's a sitcom.
The ensemble cast work brilliantly together, the supporting and recurring characters are well used, and the script is consistently funny; it even manages a reboot of sorts in season 5, retaining the same cast but modifying the premise sufficiently to avoid becoming tired.
Revolution (2012)
Somebody needs to be fired...
I do wish TV creators would stop the "write the episodes as we go" thing and decide where the plot is actually going before a single frame is shot, because this thing is a mess.
It gets off to a good start -- the premise is intriguing, the setup is tantalising, and the questions it raises are interesting -- but by the second episode it's all started to unravel and quickly descends into a directionless mess. It even seems to forget it's a sci-fi show for quite some time, and when it finally remembers it soon becomes apparent that nobody had clearly thought through the whys and wherefores of its central thesis, and this results in so much handwaving and ill-conceived nonsense that any remaining shreds of believability are lost.
In its favour the production values are pretty good and by and large the acting is competent, but in the final reckoning that can't save it from its deeper failings. Like "Under the Dome" this is a high-concept show that ruins an interesting idea with increasingly unbelievable and unfocused writing, resulting in an unsatisfying and frustrating lurch from one half-baked idea to another.
Mutant X (2001)
Abysmal failure on a grand scale
Bad TV falls in to two categories: so bad it's good, and just bad. This invented a third one: so bad it makes bad TV look brilliant. Imagine the X Men, but give most of the mutants useless powers that they don't use effectively. Now throw in terrible effects; wooden acting; dismal dialogue; amateurish direction; an editor who appeared to want to use every wipe, fade, and transition that his edit suite had available; poor cinematography; and cheap sets, and you've still got something better than this tepid stool-water.
The fight scenes are obviously meant to be a dramatic and balletic, full of slow-mo and wire-work, but sadly the fight choreography fails to deliver, the actors are unable to convincingly throw a punch, and the ensuing shambles makes Power Rangers look like high art. Outside of the action things are no better; the scripts are dire, failing both in terms of plot and pacing, and what passes for each episode's story is so predictable as to be painful. As each instalment lurches towards its inevitable conclusion one can only wonder how this got past episode 1, never mind surviving three seasons. The only reason I've not given it a lower score is that the music has a certain something...
Oh, and as a final note, for some reason the Big Bad appears to be an Andy Warhol impersonator.