Lots of things, albeit quite small ones, have happened since the last WWW, but it’s a full quality service I offer here, so I’ll do my best to let you know all of them.
We’ve had the cover of the new Wonder Woman novel released:
Empire magazine has come out and done a feature on the movie, complete with new pictures and not one but two covers:
There’s also been a new TV spot released for the movie (it doesn’t add much, though):
Meanwhile, June 3rd has been declared Wonder Woman Day by DC:
That’s the day after the movie is released, mind, so I don’t know what’s going on there.
And if you fancy helping America’s ACLU, Felix Comic Art is selling off a new piece by Cliff Chiang:
After the jump, we’ll look (in quite sketchy detail, given my backlog) at the DC Comics that have featured Diana, the Amazon Princess™, over the past two weeks: Trinity #6, Love Is Love, Justice League #15, Wonder Woman #17 and Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77. Two of those feature the (former?) father of Diana, Zeus, but you’ll have to guess which ones for now.
I should also mention that the new DC Animated Universe movie, Justice League: Dark is now available to buy. As with rather a lot of the previous DCAU movies, it’s intended less as a chance to continue the stories of the Justice League set up in Justice League: War, more as a chance to launch new spin-off series featuring different characters. So while our Diana does make an appearance, it’s mainly so she can be tied up with her own lasso, while Batman, John Constantine, Zatanna, Swamp Thing, Deadman, Jason Blood and co go off and do the real work.
If you like Zatanna and Constantine or simply miss The Guyver, it’s a must; if you’re in it for Diana, you can probably skip it.
In the US: Monday, 10/9c, NBC In the UK: Tuesdays, Amazon
Pierre Morel’s Taken is a classic action thriller. For those who by some miracle haven’t seen it, it features Liam Neeson playing an aging former spy who’s now down on his luck now he’s divorced from his wife Famke Janssen. He also doesn’t get to see his teenage daughter Maggie Grace (Lost) very much. But when Grace goes on a holiday to Paris with one of her friends and is abducted, Neeson puts into practice his ‘very particular set of skills that [he’s] acquired over a very long career’ to find Grace and rescue her.
As I mentioned quite some time ago now, it’s basically the movie that cemented Liam Neeson’s reputation as one of the West’s top action and martial arts stars. It’s not without flaws – certainly the idea that Neeson would go into paroxysms of panic at the thought of his daughter going to Paris as she would be far safer in her home town of Los Angeles is a little bit laughable. But it’s much smarter than you’d think and has some great action sequences. Just don’t watch Taken 2 or Taken 3 since they are not good movies.
Taken obviously has some unique features: Neeson isn’t a spring chicken; he’s a family man but has an estranged wife and daughter; he operates virtually alone, with only a friend or two with equally useful special skills to help him; the film is set in Europe; and Neeson has all manner of dead-drops, contacts and tradecraft to draw on in his challenge.
Strangely, NBC’s Taken uses none of this to try to tell a story that probably didn’t need telling – how Leeson got his special skills. Except it doesn’t even do that.
A prequel series, it stars Clive Standen (Vikings) as the young Liam, now revealed to be an ex-Green Beret who served in Colombia fighting drug cartels. Now back in the US, he’s on a train with his sister when she’s killed during a shootout with some men Standen thinks were after him. He then has to go on the hunt to find the man who sent them and who wants to punish him for some of his past actions.
Although he doesn’t know it, he’s drawn the attention of a covert unit headed by Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The Chicago Code, Proof) that operates outside the rest of the US intelligence community. Wanting to get to said bad guy, too, she’s happy to use Standen as bait but if he can get there by himself, that’s a win, too.
Guess whom she wants to hire by the end of the episode…
Taken is as much a prequel to the movie as Bates Motel is to Psycho, being resolutely set in modern times rather than the 70s or 80s, right down to ubiquitous iPhones. But at least Bates Motel aspires to set up the events that lead to its parent movie in some way. Here Standen arrives fully formed as an action hero, in little need of building up an already potent skillset that nevertheless seems unlikely even for a Green Beret. There’s the occasional reference to his not being married or having children yet (“Pray you never have a daughter”), but that’s about it.
Neither does it embody any of those unique qualities of the movie. The show’s clearly setting up Standen becoming part of a undercover team to fight drug cartel actions in North America (and possibly South America), so is going to be almost nothing like the movie. Indeed, rather than being a prequel to Taken it’s better to think of the series as NBC’s attempt to do its own version 24, since it has a more or less identical set-up, with Standen basically Jack Bauer in the Kim-less seasons, Beals and co the CTU of the piece.
Standen is at least a decent stand-in for both Sutherland and indeed Neeson – a former international Thai boxer and fencing gold medalist, he was also born in Northern Ireland and actually makes the effort to do a sort of blended American-Northern Irish accent à la Liam. Also among the cast is The Unit‘s Michael Irby, who’s obviously got a good action pedigree to draw on, too.
Although there are plenty of moments during the pilot where you find yourself asking “Why doesn’t he just…?” or “Why did he do that, FFS?”, Taken also does at least have some surprisingly good action scenes (unlike Taken 2 and Taken 3) and from time to time, actually does something surprising, different or unusual from the usual beats and twists of action TV plotting.
Nevertheles, Taken is largely still a generic series that offers little to really differentiate it from any other semi-ensemble action TV show. It could be worth watching if later episodes take the show in new or unusual directions or make it more similar to the movie, but at the moment, Taken is Taken in name-only.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Real-world demands got the better of me last week, so I thought I’d do WHYBW nice and early this week, just in case the world explodes or something – at least you’ll have something to read as we all float off into the aether.
Elsewhere, I reviewed a bunch of new shows, though: Newton’s Law (Australia: ABC), Imposters (US: Bravo), Bellevue (Canada: CBC) and The Good Fight (US: CBS All Access). I’ve also passed third-episode verdicts on: Riverdale (US: The CW; UK: Netflix), Powerless (US: NBC), APB (US: Fox), Imposters (US: Bravo) and Legion (US: FX; UK: Fox UK).
That means that after the jump, I’ll be discussing two weeks of the regulars: 24:Legacy, Cardinal, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Fortitude, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman and Powerless. I’ll also be looking at the season finales of Son of Zorn and Timeless, as well as the return of Billions. For a bit of excitement, you can guess which one of these I’ll be dropping from the viewing schedule.
But I have tried three new shows as well that didn’t warrant full reviews.
Doubt (US: CBS) Katherine Heigl is the brilliant, impulsive but quirky and flawed lawyer at a New York ’boutique’ legal firm full of brilliant, impulsive, quirky and flawed lawyers. Trouble is, she’s falling for the rich guy she’s defending but he might be guilty…
Despite an awesome cast (Heigl, Laverne Cox, Dulé Hill, Elliott Gould, Dreama Walker, Ben Lawson, Cassidy Freeman) and obviously being intended to be slightly comedic, Doubt is so bad as to be unwatchable. It’s insulting stupid, as clumsy as a drunk rhino in its writing and has dialogue designed to shatter bowels. I had a feeling that this was never going to go the distance and hey, would you look at that – it’s been cancelled after only two episodes, a record for the 2016-2017 season.
Patriot (Amazon) Spy comedy-thriller in the style of Wes Anderson, in which intelligence officer Michael Dorman must assume a perilous ‘non-official cover’ as a mid-level employee at a Midwestern industrial piping firm, in order to prevent Iran from going nuclear. The trouble is, as his spy dad Terry O’Quinn points out, Dorman sings folk music to ease his stress, but he’s becoming increasingly truthful with his lyrics…
All of which is funny enough and you get it all explained to you in the first ten minutes of the first episode. After that, though, the High Concept runs out and you’re left stuck with a show about a process engineer who sings songs about killing Egyptian physicists in order to preserve US interests overseas. Some nice ideas, but not really enough to support an entire episode, let alone an entire season.
Training Day (US: CBS) Adaptation of the Denzel Washington movie in which a young rookie cop is partnered with an older, wiser cop to learn the ropes. The twist is that younger cop (Justin Cornwell) has been sent to spy on the older cop (Bill Paxton), who’s suspected of not just bending the rules but of being liable to break them quite severely.
The show sets itself up as a sort of American Braquoto question what exactly makes a good cop. Are idealism and the rule of law the best and only way to fight criminals? Or is the real-world too messy and must a cop break the rules in order to best serve his higher purpose? And even if he does, if he works well with the community and gets results, shouldn’t we look the other way?
However, whatever side of the argument you support, Training Day isn’t going to answer its questions definitively because it bears as much resemblance to reality as chocolate-flavoured beachball. People are diving out of windows clutching babies to avoid explosions, automatic gunfire can’t penetrate wooden door frames, lone police officers can get into heavily armed drug dealers’ houses with a single shotgun and without killing anyone. It’s just nonsense.
As a show, it’s so daft and pointless, I actually saw the first episode three weeks ago and completely forgot I’d seen it. Unfortunately, it is now Bill Paxton’s swansong, so I thought I should at least mention it.
