Reviews

I'm not going to do a book report on this title. If you're here reading these reviews you've seen it most likely and wanted to know if others found it as bad as you, or if they are torn about it. For season 1 I am a bit torn. I liked the vibe of the city, the relationships and the dichotomy between the bumbling alkie blonde and the sleuth, scared for her life head case with daddy issues. This was interested for a few episodes. Where it loses me isn't in the storyline or acting, but in the stupid cutaways and "artistic" try hard visuals and flashbacks and sudden jumps without explanation either forward in time or back in time. At one point you are wondering if Miranda will make the flight to Rome, being shot in the leg and stopped in the airport. In the very next scene the plane is in Rome (we assume) and no one says anything about Miranda, and yet we see Miranda board the flight. Is it a different flight? Appears to be since she's in a different 1st class seat. No one knows. They basically dropped the entire plot about there, and the rest seemed like it was just squished together to get through the finale.

I got really tired of seeing dead Alex. It was cool for a couple episodes but after that Alex really needed to go. I would have liked to have seen more development of her relationship with her lawyer friend, and yet this girl was almost always mad. I realize they saved a lot for possible subsequent seasons but how can you tell a story without the actual story?

Unlike some other reviewers I wasn't annoyed with the seemingly woke message and over-representation of Gays, possibly because the characters were interesting and it fit the script for someone with that type of lifestyle, unlike a show that will shoehorn the Gay couple in just to fill the HBO checkboxes.

At the end of season 1, I wasn't sure what happened and it feels like it was just way too abrupt. There was never any satisfaction that questions were answered.

This show starts off interestingly enough, but even at the start this Yellowstone ripoff feeling comes over you. Maybe it's how we've come to expect knockoffs to be foisted upon us by the corporate entertainment machine that churns out whatever jumbled picture they can muster as long as it checks all the boxes. This one checks a lot of the boxes, but that doesn't make it interesting.

Josh Brolin is great as Royal Abbott, owner and caretaker of a large Wyoming ranch that seems to raise just under 300 cattle. Roy (as he's called) has two sons, and those two sons have their flaws. One of the sons named Perry (Tom Pelphrey) has a wife went missing a few months earlier and there's been no sign of her since. Perry is distraught and seems touchy. He has a young daughter Amy (Olive Abercrombie) who doesn't seem too affected by mommy being gone. Roy's other son Rhett (Lewis Pullman) is a rodeo cowboy who seems a bit down on his luck. Roy's wife is Cecilia (Lili Taylor). Cici is a strong willed Christian woman who has some dark secrets of her own that never get revealed in season 1.

During a scuffle outside of a bar, one of the brothers beats another man to death for making some insensitive comments regarding the missing wife. This other man is the son of Wayne Tillerson (Will Patton), a very wealthy and powerful land owner and neighbor to the Abbotts. The rest of the series has the two brothers, the dad and the mom trying to not only hide the body but to cover up the fact that they know anything about it. By this time however Roy has wondered upon a mysterious large black hole in the ground in his West pasture. Roy does some strange things like putting his hand into the hole and seeing am image of an event he would learn was actually a prediction (or actual vision, we don't know) of a sheriff's visit that played out deja vu style once he returned to his ranch house. So when Rhett and Perry Abbott return home with a dead Trevor Tillerson (Matt Lauria), Roy decides to dump the body into the black hole. These seems early on to be the best solution, except later in the series we learn that Trevor's body has resurfaced in a place it shouldn't have been, with a time of death anomaly that still hasn't been sussed out well.

Throughout the 6 episode 1st season, there is little about the hole and a lot about the soap opera lives of two land owners and their messed up familes. The hole itself seems like a side issue, it's so basically ignored to a point where it starts to make it impossible to suspend disbelief, however ironically the disbelief isn't in the physical attributes of the hole, but in how the humans who have encountered it seem to basically ignore the ramifications of its existence in the 1st place. We see Roy struggle internally with those ramifications, or so we assume, since the writers didn't see fit to let us into his struggle and we were resigned to make do with just the grunts and blank stares from Josh Brolin (who had a killer goatee, btw). This could be for dramatic effect however my pessimism-by-experience with these things tells me it's just to drag another season out of the producers, and when I begin to sense this mechanism in play I begin to lose interest or hope in any satisfying outcome.

Just to lay it out there, this show is created by the same entity that created "The OA". In fact, the brand on the Abbott's ranch is an O with an A in the middle of it, I suppose as a way to either pay self homage or maybe it's a sequel to the show itself, only no one has broken out into the silly dance that series used for parallel universe travel.

To save time, I want to list the issues with the show and how I reacted to them once I realized they existed.

1. The problem with there being a hole in the 1st place and Roy not immediately freaking out and calling everyone he knows.

2. How ready Perry was to kill a man for simply saying something insensitive, and how ready his brother Rhett was to start a coverup and involve himself right away. Then how ready Roy was to try to hide the body.

3. The way Cici (the mom) learned about it without me seeing her learn about it. (maybe I was fast forwarding through some singing).

4. The singing of Billy Tillerson (Noah Reid). Every time this guy was on screen he started singing, and not just a short burst. It was the entire song or there abouts. I would skip past it.

5. The musical score itself was atrocious and I felt it really detracted from the mood of the film.

6. The darkness (actual darkness, not evil) of the episodes (although I sit in a dark office to watch and didn't really have any issues, it was really dark.

7. The woman I left out of the explanation above because she doesn't seem to fit into the storyline. This would be Autumn (Imogen Poots), who shows up at the Abbott ranch like an Abbott groupie and wants to camp there. She is magically wherever Royal is, even in the middle of the night right where the hole exists, when Roy is dumping Trevor into the hole. Somehow she's there. She's a good actor, but her role feels too forced, like she knows something and yet we get no closer to it in episode 6 than we were in episode 2.

8. The general lack of progression in the story.

9. The symbolism that doesn't develop.

10. The awkward moments where two people just randomly change how they feel about each other (maybe due to having different directors per episode). We see Roy suddenly hate Autumn, Rhett suddenly hate his brother, the wife suddenly distrust her always stoic husband Roy, etc.., 11. The lack of a proper reaction to events like deaths and mountains disappearing, and time changing black holes and bison walking around with arrows protruding from them. It's like Roy is going the extra mile to find out who these people are that he saw on the "other side" of the time hole but he's totally ignoring the physical events that seem to be happening around him, and then nothing develops from it.

There are a few things to like, like Brolin's role, like the actual concept of the hole of time, like the mystery surrounding the visions or experiences that Roy had when he was in the hole, and like the history of the hole and how Amber, Roy and Wayne are connected to the hole itself. I have some theories on it, but those rely on things that make cinematic sense and not physical reality sense. Both of those senses can be basically discarded in favor of corporate profit sense. The answer will be left up to the viewer since it will bring more money to have more episodes. That's what's sad about these types of series, and why this one in particular is likely doomed to the same fate as the others. I might watch a season 2, but if it's just some disjointed homage to The OA, I will stop watching.

You can tell when someone is running out of either ideas or money, because they dust off the old act and dress it up like something new. This one is no different than that simple concept. They simply waited far too long to do this and there just isn't enough about the originals that deserved this resurrection.

Like some of the super hero movies that jumped the shark, this one started off by basically poking fun at itself. That's not a good way to create immersion. Then, the bad guys were just too obvious, and the footage from the original movies to remind us what happened wasn't really needed for anyone who would care enough to watch this film.

There were some cool sequences, but most of the film beyond the game designer phase felt like a retread over familiar ground with the same fight sequences.

Overall it felt forced and unnecessary, but like the original Matrix, didn't know where to put it's main protagonist. While the development of the background was decently explained, the characters themselves were more bot-like than the actual bots. I do like Moss and Reeves, but I felt Neo was John Wick acting like Neo, couldn't even shave the beard or cut the hair for the role to distinguish himself from Wick who is obviously more fresh in people's mind than is a much younger Neo.

I'm not going to be too hard on this film. If anyone went into this disaster film with "The Rock" as the lead, expecting coherent storyline and originality, well you're probably new to movies.

That said, here are the things I liked about the film...

1. The Rock (how can you not like The Rock?) 2. The CGI

That's about it.

What's wrong with the film?

Although I wasn't expecting much, the formulaic approach is so cliche by now that it's embarrassing to see The Rock do it.

1. Super hero level nonsense 2. Unrealistic sequences 3. Geography problems throughout 4. The laws of physics cease to exist in the Rock's Kitchen (but can you smell what the Rock is cooking?) 5. Tsunami when the quake was inland (and headed toward the land at that) 6. The insane amount of time Blake (his living daughter) was without air after drowning (based on what they did, it should have been about 10 minutes if you include him grabbing her, getting her to a dry floor, her laying there while the Rock had a monologue with the Aussie with the English brother, getting her on the boat, getting out of the building and then giving up on her after trying CPR unsuccessfully. Then a heart touching moment, then super Rock brings her back from the dead) 7. The fact he gave up on her in the 1st place.

8. Needing to see her drown before he cared enough to actually break the barrier 9. Rich man bad cliche 10. Wife was moving in with him and had no idea he was a tool?

11. People dying left and right and the priority was to shimmy up that bridge pylon and unfurl that huge flag.

Yeah pretty bad, but still watchable.

This show started out interesting enough. Season 1 was formulaic but still entertaining. Then comes season 2 - repeat of Season 1 basically. Each season is a repeat of season 1.

The entire series is about "my land" and everyone else needs to get off of it and don't try to buy or annex or claim with imminent domain, else you'll get killed accidentally.

Also, don't go to work for the Yellowstone ranch, because it's like the Hotel California.. you can check out but you cannot leave except on the long black train.

There's not really anything else to the story. You have an old sage in Costner. His 3 sons and one daughter who is completely overdone in how much little man syndrome she has. You learn eventually why she's that way, but it's grating to experience her and she adds nothing to the show that a simple high IQ businesswoman with better manners couldn't pull off.

The number of deaths on this show is staggering. They cannot breathe without someone getting killed. The kid cannot walk 6 feet from Costner without falling into a river, getting on a snake or getting kidnapped. Poor Kahse cannot even go to the store without needing to shoot someone for any number of reasons, and if there's any reason at all he can imagine to grab his gun and go after someone for anything, he does it.

Supposedly the ranch hasn't posted a profit in several years, but everyone has a new truck and they built a new barn and keep hiring people, spending millions on horses. Someone is cooking the books.

Let's look at just the deaths into the 3rd season..

The mother The brother The brother in law The businessman The cowboy (train station) Two kidnappers Meth cooker Two assassins Several white supremicists Both bad guys A horse thief A 17 year old kid

on and on

This isn't what ranch life in Montana is like. This isn't even what mafia life in NY is like. There weren't this many killings on the Sopranos. I think the writers just lack ideas and understanding of their audience so they went full on murder flick.

It's a decent watch but it leaves you feeling like there are probably 5 characters in total that could float the show and everyone else is simply noise. Beth is really really noise.

Then you have to deal with all the plot holes (and there are plenty). What happened to the trip in the plane that had a bomb in it? No idea. How about that wolf that kept watching Kahse and Monica? Did the boy really recover that fast from PTSD by going out to a river and building a camp fire? How did Monica arrange to trap that serial killer guy and did she manage it on her first attempt? What about how mad Monica was going to be when she learned her brother was killed by her husband? That seemed to just fade away. What about Kahse's commitment to rejoin the teams? Never said another word about it. Also, they keep saying he was in the Navy but he has a SEAL trident on his back window. He seems a bit young to be a retired SEAL, and they never actually call him a retired SEAL. I would think if he was going to run for office, being a retired SEAL would be the top of the brochure during a campaign. Also there's no real sense of time passing, bullet wounds seem to magically go away and a busted up face on Beth seems to magically heal between episodes. Jaime's character is poorly written, conflicted is good, but he's not just conflicted. He's completely evil and pathetic. It's odd that Costner adopted a child and then forced him into a profession only to help Costner's corruption. The singing cowboy is misplaced and another character we know really nothing about. The two barrel riders are out of left field. Seems like everyone who's anyone on Texas or Montana ranches got a shot.

Odd show.

Once you get over the predictability aspects if you saw We Were Soldiers, it's a decent film. But for those of you who didn't get the comparison:

1. Same basic music when enemy is charging 2. Mel Gibson/Travis Fimmel both shoot a charging VC point blank 3. Mel Gibson had teams around him pinned down 4. Danger close in both movies, WWS actually hit the Americans 5. Both issued a basic Broken Arrow (Travis called in napalm) 6. All looked lost until the rapid fire machine gun from the APCs (WWS was the helo with Greg Kinnear). 7. Similar ending music and story

I mean, it's a decent flick with some "less than heavy" Aussie humor and situations, but it's obvious it was basically ripped from WWS.

Though the crew no doubt went through hard times in this, you can catch glimpses of stacking the deck for or against certain people (life jackets for a certain few, force feeding one person water to get them to quit, intentionally denying a team leader water in the coolers just to jump on them later about it and switch to a young boy team leader... It's entertainment, what do you expect?

Why didn't one of the women carry the dead guy? Why did all the strength requirements only fall on the guys?

I just felt like this show didn't get far enough outside the Reality TV realm of scripted outcomes to make it actually believe it.

After the 1st episode I felt like I had seen this show before. It steals err... borrows elements from other popular shows like Homeland. Some of the acting is atrocious (pastor's daughter, POTUS, messiah's cardboard zombie like presence and walk, everything being just a bit too M Night Shamylanish.

The story drags out for what seems like forever with long, boring dialogue about the lives of people I couldn't care less about. Oh and a Muslim with a suicide vest! Never saw that one coming.

Quick synopsis:

Jesus dude stands on corner in Syria during windstorm, windstorm is historic and runs ISIS off, killing many of them. Jesus dude gets credit and leads a bunch of homeless Muslims out into the desert to the borders of Israel (yawn..) where they sit and wait for him after he's captured by what I consider Mossad. Bad Israeli agent is frightened by Muslim Jesus. Muslim Jesus escapes and, after saving a boy who was shot by guards coming to get him (Jesus with the ear anyone?) and showing everyone the non collapsed bullet from a high powered rifle at close range he somehow magically retrieves from the boy, he disappears to America just in time to save a chain smoking, fake accent girl from a tornado in Texas (Texas and tornadoes are like peas in a pod). Stupid Texans follow him all the way to Washington where he walks on the water of the reflective pool of the Washington monument.. David Copperfield eat your heart out. Now everyone is so enamored with him. He gains an audience with the POTUS and convinces the POTUS to withdraw all troops from everywhere in the world back to the US.

Ok that's enough stupid for a lifetime.

I went into this thinking "hey it got a golden globe, probably artsy film with political messages that resonate with today's 30 somethings, but after the 1st episode I was curious to see where it went.

I won't go into a walkthrough level recounting of the series, but I can say it was pretty entertaining and captivating for the most part. I grew to like the main character, perhaps due in part to the 4th wall violations happening so often, as if we had a personal connection. Then somewhere around the end of the 1st season, beginning of the 2nd, that constant glance at the camera became a bit over the top. Phoebe is basically a person who needs everyone to tell her want to do, all the time, and her "say anything, do anything at any time" approach doesn't wreak the havoc that it would IRL. I mean, she's a business owner, and are we to believe that, because she got a loan, suddenly she had a lot of business?

There's enough going on between the sisters and the mom to create interest, but some of the side issues haven't been sussed out as well as they should, and we're going into season three with still not much information. Maybe we don't get any information.

I gave it a 7 because face it, there are only a small handful of shows that would ever get a 10 and as well a 1. Those doing either are either all or nothing types are they are shills who post reviews for profit.

The show is good, as others have said. The problem I have is that, while the zero G effects are being shown, blood droplets and such free floating, people are helping each other walk between location, another person has their arms folded, yet another is leaning down and propping themselves up by their arm. Then you see people beginning to sit.

You can obviously only go so far without actually being in zero G, so the crew has to act it out, but things being dropped (a body in one instance, pulled from a shelf and it falls to the floor in a zero G environment), these things don't make any sense. I cannot get over the conflict, and don't even know when they do or don't have gravity. Women's hair hanging down while they are using gravity boots, arms swinging normally while walking, and arms being dropped to their sides instead of floating. People resting their bodies and arms on things in zero G..

It's a great show, just has some odd characteristics due to being in zero G and being unable to actually reproduce the effects accurately. We've seen enough zero G movies to catch the differences.

The story was interesting enough in the progression of Claire trying to get home, but the masses of 15 sec porn clip viewers have to be satiated, so male rape scenes, female rape scenes, masochism, domination, all the little fetishes viewers have get addressed in a way that pretends to be about the storyline. It's thinly veiled soft porn. Once you realize that you can pretty much guess the rest.

Add to that the fact that Claire is insufferable, unrealistic and too modern for a woman of the time period she's supposed to be from to begin with and you get a made to order soap opera heroine with a romance novel level, Fabio style hero from the 18th century who's a virgin, woke and rivals Jesus himself for virtue. Of course the show is about tearing him down. What Claire doesn't destroy in him, the villain takes from him in hours of torture porn complete with spit on the rear and hair pulling.

In every series these days you have to ask yourself "is this the lesbian scene?" or "is this the Gay scene?" because you know the producers are marketing for everyone and it's going to be in there. With this abomination, these scenes were put in as rape scenes to avoid contaminating the time period with today's agenda, but it's there.

Save yourself the trouble and just watch porn. You'll avoid all the pontificating by Claire, the finger wagging, the morality lessons and virtue signaling.

I almost expect a series where Reynolds doesn't actually participate, but his voice is around and he's funding the operations, so to speak. They spent so much time on the 1st bad guy that having more than one was pointless. Their plans are stupid, they don't have any tactical sense and other than the sniper, no team cohesion. Expensive cars in loud colors, attacking a presidential yacht in neon green spandex, physics that only affect the bad guys despite the obvious.

The movie is a mess. It's slightly entertaining but I kept waiting for Deadpool to show.

I could spend a few paragraphs waxing poetic about the merits of the film, about the story of Hoffa, but you can read all that in some of these other flowery reviews by paid shills and perhaps by folks who long to be paid shills.

They couldn't get DeNiro and Pacino together for anything great outside of Heat, but here they are jammed into this mess of a film. Pesci is his normal great self, and he and Al carried the film. Robert needs to be put out to pasture. He played Robert DeNiro playing Robert DeNiro. If you've seen him in just about anything else, you've seen him here. No emotional range, maybe I assumed some feelings at times when he was feeling some remorse about his role, but he's basically a stuttering guy in the film like in real life, and repeats himself just like then. Someone doing a DeNiro impression would be able to do the same role.

The story feels like an epic.. but it's not really interesting. Sure these guys were very powerful in their day, and they died old men in nursing homes if they weren't shot in the face by the others. A lot of code, innuendo and assumptions were made and the audience was left to guess what they were talking about. It's as if you weren't a made guy so you weren't in on it.

It really felt a bit like Ocean's 11, with the inside jokes between actors who knew each other, cared for each other but didn't care at all about the audience. I was the 3rd wheel in this reunion flick. I just wish they picked a better subject, maybe fiction.. something that allowed Robert DeNiro to be himself instead of that stupid CGI red face offering they did where Robert looked older than Pesci even though Pesci was calling him "kid". I couldn't suspend disbelief enough to get around that crazy antic, and the fact the director allowed it just shows that they know the audience will buy anything with that cast.

Other than Bob's part, the casting was great. What a line up, 10 years ago this would have been impossible due to the fee each of these actors would command. You have 3 or 4 leading actors playing support roles. I guess when you have DeNiro and Pacino as the main characters, you don't complain about your part and likely many actors jumped at the chance to be in the film. Still, it was too long and I didn't come away feeling anything other than tired for watching it. I didn't care about Bob's character, or Hoffa, or anyone else.. even Sookie Stackhouse and the guy who imprisoned Jessie Pinkman.

Season one, for me, was Homeland rewritten to have Jack Ryan.

Season two had the exact scene from Mission Impossible, where Cruise is running atop the glass arches buildings and eventually jumps into a river. It was so predicable once you saw them on the roofs running.

I was hoping the pure female candidate was secretly behind the assassination of the senator, to make her opponent look bad, and that her husband disappeared because he found something while mining and found a way to continue in secret to fund his wife's political run. Out with one crook, in with another. But no, it wasn't to be. Instead, it was about as scooby do as you could get, with the antagonist being obvious from the start, completely over the top with zero redeeming features.

I didn't get the point of the black guy boat driver being even included in the story. He disobeys orders time and again, basically gets his leader killed because of it and somehow he's a hero? I couldn't wrap my head around a military op needing a civilian boat driver because he was SWCC. Even if he was the best SWCC ever, he acted like he never heard of an order and didn't trust anyone on the team from the start. That whole side show of the black ops team with Jack running amok through the prison camp with cutters was pathetic.

It was truly a moment of "we can't believe we got a 2nd season" from the writers, because they appeared to have just thrown together something that made no sense, was full of plot holes (satellite anyone?... German assassin in Venezuela anyone?, a stereotypical polo match anyone? "Let them eat ham" anyone? Cut throat = instant death!.. lol)

I was hoping for more. I cannot believe this clown was chosen for Jack Ryan.

The movie started just fine, even then Jessie was like fat and old, and the Jessie I remembered was neither.

Then came the useless time fillers of him just sitting and staring for several minutes while some flashback of something meaningless played, with another way too fat character tried to suck more money from the franchise.

You already get the satisfaction that Fat Todd is dead, as well as are the other antagonists, but there had to be a Clint Eastwood scene where Jessie actually faces off with two guys. It was basically uneventful and predictable.

That letter Jessie hands over at the end is Vince Gilligan mailing this movie in. Hard pass if I was you.

This entire show and the cast outside of Spader are all there for the sole purpose of allowing Spader to perform, to entertain at the level of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, just not as morbid. Spader is so far above the realm of this TV series it's laughable. The show could be called "Life and Times of Raymond Reddington" and they could kill of that cardboard character/actress Lizzy (Megan Boone) and introduce new FBI folks now and then and let Red toy with them like Hannibal would do, like Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman". Red and Dembe are the show. The things that happen in scenes that don't include Red can be simply skipped.

But let's talk about why the show got an 8 from me:

I simply cannot stand looking at Megan Boone. She has that stoic, slack jawed gaze that screams out "I took far too many selfies and posed too much". She's posing in the show, she's not acting. When a scene calls for drama, it's provide by Spader who can drag your emotions where ever he pleases. Liz seems to have just showed up to give Spader a sparing partner, but she's easily the worst actress in the entire cast (including extended cast of cameos and such).

For some reason, Liz is still with the task force though they never use her profiling skills now. She didn't earn anything she has, and doesn't bear the scars or attitude of someone who's gone through what she supposedly has. This could be bad writing, but somehow Spader pulls it off. Unless James has a different writer (or improvises greatly), something is fishy in Denmark.

The FBI lead (Harold) is a generic good guy who has slowly grown to not only trust Reddington, but to commit to him personally over even the FBI. If you've watched the series you understand why. Ressler is conflicted, has his own skeletons but portrays a starched, dyed in the wool agent. It's telling that the talent around Boone is much better than she is, and I really expected her to be some producers relative and still not sure how she was ever cast for this role. She has survived it because Spader sold the connection between Red and Liz as well as anything was ever sold in a TV show. Having the same drive without Liz or with a different Liz would make Spader less of a presence. Without him, there is no show.

Much of the show is like many TV series where deus ex machina gets them through so many episodes, and the formulaic approach where you know the bad guy is always one of the 1st few people the FBI interviews as an "expert" is overdone, but Spader is never boring. Hard to fathom how one man his age got that many stories as Reddington has, but the show could be half the run time and just be his ordeal, start to finish.

I read the other reviews and see so many other people feel the same way I do about Boone. It's not character saturation, it's likely the fact that writers have nothing to work with. Boone cannot act a lick, so all they can do for her is give her a few lines and some long, teary eyed (though not crying) stares at the ceiling, mouth agape with that underbite. I read she wears a wig as well, but I didn't notice that through her horrific acting, and when she's with Spader in a scene and he's doing his thing, she's so insignificant. She's a placeholder for the target of his affection, a life of sacrifice for a single purpose and it's her, and that could be anyone. It didn't need to be Megan Boone.