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| Neeson as Bryan Mills |
This is a spin-off from the Liam Neeson film franchise. I
gather the films are pretty formulaic, with Neeson’s protagonist, the
ordinary-sounding Bryan Mills, a name that is also used in the TV series, but
which sounds more like a mail-order catalogue from the 1970s than a moniker for
an action hero, tooling up with weapons prior to encountering some cartoon-like
baddies and somehow despatching them one by one. You know the sort of thing I
mean, the films your Dad and brother love and love partly because they know
what to expect. It’s only ever gonna go one way.
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| Rollo, never without a weapon |
The only possible justification for this series is the sex
appeal and presence of Clive Standen
(who I loved as Rollo in Vikings,
let’s face it, he’s not hard to look at) but it’s a poor vehicle for his
talents. He does his best, much like
Patrick Swayze (Rest in Peace) in The Beast* (I’ve
got to say that Travis Fimmel was far better in Vikings than in the latter), with a poorly scripted, poorly plotted
show. I can't fault Standen. Because of his
physique, he’s a much more credible ‘special ops’ guy than Neeson, for
instance, or even Bruce Willis. He delivers his lines, no matter how
nonsensical, with absolute conviction.
 |
| Bryan Mills, ditto |
It’s just so hackneyed, the storyline from IMDb says Mills
is coping with a personal tragedy as are all the heroes in these shows, from
Leroy Gibbs (Mark Harmon) in NCIS to Patrick
Jane (Simon Baker) in The Mentalist, to Walt (Robert Taylor) in Longmire. Feel free to comment and add
your own.
Jennifer Beals, who is the source of all the missions this
elite team take on and for some reason ends up looking like a man in drag, asks to
see Clive alone to say: ‘I just wanted to check in with you’. He’s bemused:
‘Ok. Why?’ We say: ‘Because you’re sexy?’ I can completely understand why Standen took
the role – a lead in a TV series seems too good to resist, especially when
you’ve been playing second fiddle to Ragnar for a while but he’s capable of
much more than this.
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| Carrie Mathison |
It’s sort of Homeland
without, oh, everything that Homeland has – real suspense, fully developed and
engaging leads, believable storylines, quickfire and natural-seeming dialogue and a character you root for even when she's really annoying you in Claire Danes's Carrie Mathison (like Buffy, 'she saved the world, a lot').
For more on Homeland, see Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) and Peter Quinn in Homeland.
What we get is a whole load of on-the-nose dialogue (i.e.
dialogue that explains a character’s back-story or tells us what they’re like),
something like ‘So you’ve been sent here after your actions in the whatever
when this and this happened’. See my review of Ferocious Planet for some good examples. The characters are
stereotypes. There’s always a nerdy computer whiz (a boffin, I love that word),
often Jewish for some reason, who has trouble making small talk or relating to
others.
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| Patrick Swayze, Travis Fimmel, The Beast |
*My favourite line was Swayze’s character, Charles Barker’s comment
on a mysterious band of baddies: ‘It
doesn’t have a name. Sometimes they call
it the Outfit.’ Ok, so that would be a name, Patrick.
For more on Travis Fimmel,Clive Standen, etc., see Ragnar and Athelstan. For more on Ragnar, see Travis Fimmel is Ragnar Lothbrok.
