So it should serve as a pleasant surprise that “Star Trek: Section 31” arrives full of nuance and charm.

Viewers actually do not need to know any Section 31 lore or have watched “Star Trek: Discovery” — the “Trek” series from which the film is spun off — to understand what is happening in the film, although, if you have, some of the emotional stakes will hit harder. The film itself quickly brings viewers up to speed via a communication from Section 31 command to Alok Sahar (Omari Hardwick), the leader of a covert ops team. He is instructed to recruit Phillipa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Georgiou has been a character in “Discovery” since the first season: the briefing quickly recaps the reveal that she was the emperor of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe (you know, the evil Earth one where Spock had a beard, and Uhura had a thigh dagger), and that she was brought to the prime universe, became an agent for Section 31, saved the universe, traveled forward in time, traveled back in time and now is the owner of a nightclub (a lot happens in “Discovery”). Alok reluctantly recruits Georgiou and they, along with their team of misfits, must track down a terrifying weapon before it can be used to destroy the Federation.

It’s a simple but effective premise. Despite its title, the film is barely about Section 31, the division being more of a plot device to get all these characters together and on mission. The film —directed and written by “Discovery” alums Olatunde Osunsanmi and Craig Sweeny — is actually more about Georgiou herself.

One of the franchise’s most complicated characters, Georgiou is not traditional Starfleet material. “Discovery” established that when she was emperor in the Mirror Universe, she was a horrific dictator who committed genocide on multiple planets. This kind of character bio is typically reserved for the quintessential “Star Trek” villain. However, she became a fan favorite in Season 2 of “Discovery,” mainly because of Yeoh’s natural charisma —“evil mommy” is how I can best describe her vibe — and her chemistry with the show’s protagonist Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). Her bond with Michael and other characters in the series caused her to begin questioning her “might makes right” Terran values and to act in more ethical, although not too ethical, ways.

“Section 31” continues Georgiou’s arc from lawful evil to chaotic neutral. For one thing, as the film’s opening flashback reveals, she became emperor of the Terran empire after decimating her opposition in a “Hunger Games”-like combat competition, poisoning her family to eliminate any potential weaknesses and subjugating her boyfriend — San (played as a teenager by James Huang and as an adult by James Hiroyuki Liao), the Peeta to her Katniss — to servitude. It’s brutal, but it is a look into why Georgiou is the way she is. In order to survive, Georgiou had to embody Nietzsche’s master morality that forms the basis of the Terran empire: “the girl I knew has been murdered,” as San laments.

The film doesn’t excuse her past actions. In fact, she grapples with the idea of what it means to “be infected with a conscience” in this new universe where more is expected of her. This mission confronts her with her own culpability: She is the one who ordered the creation of the movie’s McGuffin —the weapon of mass destruction the team is tasked to find — when she was emperor, a weapon so evil that its makers committed suicide on its completion. Can she atone for that? Or, at least, choose to be better? Underneath all that arrogant bravado (“I’m the only one I could never defeat”) is a deeply tragic figure that can no longer deny the consequences of her actions.

Despite all of this deep, philosophical exploration of character, Georgiou and the movie are also just plain fun. It’s a spy thriller, a genre not often utilized by “Star Trek,” complete with a mole hunt and the fast tempos and pulsing rhythms of a spy score, composed by Jeff Russo. While Section 31 was originally introduced as a way to foil spy fiction with a more realistic look at how spycraft works, this film leans into a more “Mission: Impossible” style fantasy, complete with gadgets and stunts. The film is divided into “chapters” with titles like “One Night in Baraam” and “The Godsend,” reminiscent of the films of Quentin Tarantino and a nod back to the spinoff series origins of the film. There are some wonderful set pieces that show off Yeoh’s formidable action chops, including a kinetic brawl in Georgiou’s night club where she wears the most magnificent cape ever seen in a “Star Trek.” It’s a “Star Wars” level cape.

The other characters on the team provide great support to Georgiou in their various shades of moral alignment. One is recognizable by name to fans as Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), future captain of the Enterprise-C from the classic “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” The uptight representative of Starfleet, she’s there to make sure the team doesn’t violate any ethical boundaries — she has to tell Georgiou multiple times not to assassinate anyone — but she clearly also struggles with following strict procedure in the face of complex situations. Other characters are original to the film, including the neurotic shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), Deltan honey trap Melle (Humberly González), himbo mech-head Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok) and a-nano-species-inside-a-robot-Vulcan Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), who inexplicably speaks with an Irish accent. Alok himself is a survivor of the often referenced Eugenics Wars; he’s genetically augmented and, thus, is not allowed to officially join Starfleet. He is suspicious of Georgiou because he’s met dictators before and is unsure if she can be redeemed, but there is also genuine connection and chemistry between them, an understanding of the horrors of being forced to be part of a paradigm that they now regret.

The group becomes, well, maybe not a family, but certainly a team that respects each other for who they are, not who they were.

The first “Star Trek” film in almost 10 years — yes, Justin Lin’s “Star Trek: Beyond” was released in 2016 – “Section 31” is under a lot of pressure, but, despite my initial reservations, it manages to stick the landing. My only critique is that I wish this was a series as originally intended as I would love to spend more time with these characters. Using Section 31 is a clever way of interrogating redemption arcs and who utopias allow to be included, but the film resists the urge to give into the cynicism that has irked fans of “Star Trek” about the organization in the past. “Star Trek: Section 31” has a distinct personality while still feeling like a “Trek” film, with characters outside of the normal scope of the franchise.

“Star Trek: Section 31” premieres Friday, Jan. 24, on Paramount+.

The post ‘Star Trek: Section 31’ Review: Michelle Yeoh Proves Skeptics Wrong in Charming Paramount+ Spinoff Film appeared first on TheWrap.

The trailers for writer/director Drew Hancock’s debut feature “Companion” are giving the audience a very good idea of the movie they’re about to watch, and that’s a little unfortunate, because the film is best viewed without any preconceived notions. Hancock’s wry and creepy screenplay sets its own expectations, inviting the audience along for a particular kind of scary thrill ride. When Hancock pulls out the rug we can see through the floor, into the movie’s mechanisms, and it’s a treat to uncover what kind of machine he’s actually built for us — all of which is harder to do if you’re 30 minutes ahead of the plot just because you saw the marketing.

So in the interest of not compounding the issue — especially since “Companion” is such a joy to discover on one’s own — this review will dance around the movie’s core premise to the best of my film critic abilities. “The Red Eye Effect” is bad enough. Let’s not make it worse.

“Companion” stars Sophie Thatcher (“Heretic”) as Iris, who was gliding through life without incident until she met Josh (Jack Quaid, “The Boys”), who is her perfect guy. He’s handsome, he’s charming and you’ve probably seen enough romantic comedies to know that any meet-cute as cute as this — there are oh, so many oranges! — means they’re destined to fall in love. To hear Iris tell it, meeting Josh was one of the two most important, eye-opening moments of her life.

The other, as she says in the film’s opening voiceover, is when she killed him.

The story kicks off when Josh and Iris drive to an isolated luxury house in the middle of a forest — yup, we’re doing one of these — where they’re planning to party with Josh’s friends and their lovers. Kat (Megan Suri, “It Lives Inside”) is Josh’s bestie, and Iris is very jealous of their connection and possible romantic (or formerly romantic) relationship. Her boyfriend, a married Russian who earned his millions the dirty way, is Sergey (Rupert Friend, “Asteroid City”), and he’s just gross. Also in attendance are Josh’s flighty friend Eli (Harvey Guillén, “What We Do in the Shadows”) and his extremely hot boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, “Smile 2”).

As we wait to find out what’s going to go horribly wrong, we take note of various details that will probably be important later. Kat’s confession that Iris makes her feel “replaceable.” A mysterious item in Josh and Iris’ luggage. The fact that Josh, ostensibly the perfect guy, actually seems like a total tool. Any movie where a boyfriend rolls over and goes to sleep right after sex without saying a thing is, after all, a movie with a crappy boyfriend in it.

When violence does break out, it seems like a familiar sort of violence. Brutal and disturbing, but in a “low budget what do we do about this murder and how do we keep from killing each other now that the first domino has fallen” kind of way. And hey, it seems like a fine, albeit formulaic place for “Companion” to go, using an unexpected explosion of bloodletting to explore the repressed feelings inside a seemingly harmless person, calling into question the relationships they’ve formed, and forcing everyone to reveal who they really are.

And that’s kind of what happens, but Hancock’s twisteroos are fiendish, and “Companion” soon spirals into exciting and ingenious directions. The fundamental conceits, once finally revealed, speak volumes about the way men view women and women are conditioned to view men. An idyllic vision of love meets the commodification of love, and the commodification of love turns out to be insincere, insecure and dangerous. What’s more, Hancock has a vicious sense of humor about it. The whole thing is freaky and funny as hell.

Thatcher has a wallflower to play for the first chunk of “Companion,” but as she breaks out of her expectations, she goes on an engrossing journey and a lot of people end up dead. All the people she thought she loved, and their mostly-awful friends, drop their façades and reveal their pathetic and dangerous wretchedness. Iris and Josh are on a nonstop collision course with self-discovery, and they don’t make the discoveries they were hoping for. Thatcher captivates and Quaid proves once again that he’s one of the most charming on-screen (and voiceover) performers in the industry, and that he isn’t afraid to tear all that down and dig up the awfulness that veneer often hides.

Hancock does a fabulous job of balancing his film’s early romantic leanings and the horror (and possibly other genre) conceits that emerge as his story unfolds, and all the emotional truths that prop all those aspects up. It’s one of the better screenplays of its ilk in years, setting up ideas and rules and playing with them in every imaginable way, and repeatedly surprising the audience while always playing fair. That it evokes some familiar territory in the first act, especially, is by design, but sometimes it’s more distracting than others.

“Companion” was produced by Zach Eggers, whose own breakout horror feature “Barbarian” was a big hit in 2022 and also relied on unexpected twists and turns. It’s the “Barbarian” connection that’s touted in the trailers, along with the fact that Warner Bros. also released the schmaltzy romance classic “The Notebook.” How cheeky. But the cynicism of “Barbarian” wasn’t tempered. It was ugly — arguably to a fault — and its anger wasn’t always well-placed. Hancock’s film takes a similar approach to the storytelling but tells a more satisfying story. It’s scary, in a very different way. It’s funny, in a somewhat similar way. “Companion” is an impressively constructed mechanism that functions exactly how it’s supposed to, even when it seems like it’s not, and it never lets us down.

The post ‘Companion’ Review: Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid Star in a Wily, Well-Oiled Scary Movie Machine appeared first on TheWrap.

More actors than anyone can count — strike that, I guess there’ve been 18 bazillion — have put their stamp on this 425-year-old play about a prince and his revenge against his conspiring, murderous uncle. The words “to be or not to be” are emblazoned within the global lexicon, preserving forever Shakespeare’s complex thoughts about ending one’s own life, as generation after generation of performers and directors put their own stamp on perhaps the most well-worn dramatic material humanity has.

But I’ve never seen a “to be or not to be” speech quite like the one in “Grand Theft Hamlet.” It is now a speech about life spoken to lifeless automatons, frequently interrupted by real-life jerks who murder the actor mid-speech. Half absurd, half profound. That’s what you get for staging a Shakespearean play within the confines of “Grand Theft Auto Online,” a multiplayer game where the players undertake exciting criminal missions or, just as often, screw around and shoot each other in the face with rockets and attack jets.

The year was 2021, and like many, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were out of work, locked away in their homes, and going a little mad north-north-west. While living vicariously through their online avatars, they stumbled across an area of San Andreas — the game’s cheeky stand-in for Southern California — they had never seen before. A giant amphitheater, exactly the sort of venue an actor dreams of headlining. And they consider, perchance, the possibility of staging a production within the game, since live performances were no longer possible due to the lockdown and COVID precautions.

“Grand Theft Hamlet” is a plucky underdog story — a modern, cartoonishly violent version of Mickey Rooney declaring, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” They’re not trying to save orphans from a workhouse or protect their beloved community center from being gentrified by mean Mr. Douglas; they’re just filling a void in their lives, simultaneously embracing and rejecting the options provided for them by escapist entertainment. Instead of following the expectations of Rockstar Games and unbridling their darkest ids in a seedy underworld, they use “GTA Online” as a canvas to create something powerful and beautiful. The only difference is it’s with attack jets and a badass blimp scene, because they might as well work with what they’ve got.

Directed by Sam Crane and documentarian Pinny Grylls, “Grand Theft Hamlet” can’t help but enthrall us. The film exists in an impersonal world that becomes increasingly and clumsily personal, because the film never leaves a digital environment. Crane and Grylls, who are married, have prolonged arguments over the amount of time he’s spending on this online production of “Hamlet,” occasionally accosted by annoying NPCs. At one point, Crane, extremely lonely, says he wishes he could give his wife a hug. That’s when she reminds him that he can. After all, they live in the same house. 

When you’re putting on a show, that show becomes your whole life. Especially when you didn’t have a life to begin with. There are inevitable moments when impracticalities overwhelm these actors and they debate whether to shelve the whole project, but those decisions have great weight because your actors, at least some of them, have literally nothing else in their lives right now. They have no other friends or family to interact with. They just have gaming and, now, artistic creation as their outlet.

Crane and Oosterveen are not alone. They hold auditions in San Andreas for their production, which leads to frequent accidental murders and police interventions. They enlist some first-time actors — and at least one other professional, Jen Cohn, the voice of Pharah in “Overwatch” — and gradually attract some other randos who unofficially join the team, either by quietly turning up wherever they’re scouting locations or by working as their unofficial security, murdering other nearby players before anyone can interrupt rehearsals by, again, murdering. They’re the rowdiest possible equivalent of the rabble at the old Globe Theater, chucking rotten vegetables at the players they don’t like and rushing the stage to join the sword fights.

Life, and theater, and video games — they are what we make of them. The absurd profundity of “Grand Theft Hamlet” speaks to our wonderful human ability to express ourselves. We make something out of nothing. We find meaning in that which seems meaningless. If there is one disappointing element of this moving, amusing, sad and memorable film it’s that it isn’t five hours long. Because we don’t see their final production of “Hamlet” in its entirety, just a broad overview of its highlights and its hilarious accidental tragedies.

One suspects that the play could have been a movie unto itself. The play is, after all, the thing.

The post ‘Grand Theft Hamlet’ Review: There’s Something Rousing in the State of San Andreas appeared first on TheWrap.

Why?

Why now? Why this film? What was it about this particular project that brought Cameron Diaz back in front of the camera? “Back in Action” has as generic a screenplay as it gets. It’s the same type of cut-and-paste formulaic family adventure you’d find on “The Magical World of Disney” nearly half a century ago, but a lot more expensive and a lot less endearing. It’s for films like “Back in Action” that the word “mediocre” was invented, because it’s not that this film is bad. It’s not interesting or ambitious enough to be bad. It simply “is.” The film’s baseline mainstream competence is almost as exciting as an empty screen.

Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx star as Emily and Matt, two super-spies on a mission to steal “The Key,” which can digitally manipulate any aspect of the world’s infrastructure. Right before their assignment goes south, she reveals to Matt that she’s pregnant with his child. So when their airplane crashes they take the opportunity to fake their own deaths and live a normal suburban life, raising kids and coaching soccer and selling homemade puzzles on Etsy.

Fifteen years later, Emily and Matt have a sulky teenage daughter named Alice (McKenna Roberts, “Barbie”) and a computer geek son named Leo (Rylan Jackson, “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”), who both think their parents are boring boomers. When they have to rescue 14-year-old Alice from violent adults running a nightclub with drugs and underage drinking — a dark subplot that goes nowhere — they reveal their martial arts mastery and accidentally go viral, finally blowing their cover after a decade-and-a-half.

Soon their old handler, played by Kyle Chandler (a rhyme which is more amusing than most of this movie), arrives to say that The Key is still missing and secret agencies all over the world will stop at nothing to get it back. He’s immediately killed. Their other old handler, played by Andrew Scott (no rhymes there), is extremely super shady and probably evil. If you’ve never seen a movie before you might not be able to guess where that’s all going, but if you have, I’m sorry. Don’t buckle up. It’s not going to be a bumpy night.

You will not be surprised by anything that happens in “Back in Action.” Even the film’s big secret cameo is a beloved actor who these days seems to leave holes in their schedule just in case a streaming service calls with a last-minute gig. Emily and Matt go on the run to retrieve The Key and get their lives back, but they have to bring Alice and Leo with them. They hide that they’re spies for so long that it makes their kids seem weirdly clueless. And yes, eventually those kids will be kidnapped.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s nothing wrong with a formula, so long as that formula is an excuse to deliver something else too. A formula is a skeleton, and the style, the humor, the message, the personality, or the chemistry, these are all the meat that can hang off of it. Without anything to deliver, even a tried-and-true formula will fail as a delivery system. “Back in Action” is an idea for a movie that happens to be nearly two hours long (with an eleven-minute credits sequence – yes, that’s right, eleven minutes). It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

Even this film’s MacGuffin doesn’t MacGuff very well. The Key is a very important thingy and they need to get it. Great. You didn’t even have to tell us what it did, “Back in Action,” but now that you have — and now that you’ve failed to sufficiently distract us — we have lots of time to think about it. You’re telling us that a device which can circumnavigate the digital security of any computer system in the world fifteen years ago is still effective? Nothing about computers has changed, at all, since the first iPad came out? We solved Y2K with nary a hitch but in 15 years of knowing a universal computer key was out there somewhere and bad guys were looking for it, nobody came out with a security patch? I know our trust in government is at an all-time low but sheesh, at least give their I.T. department some credit.

What “Back in Action” has that no other movie has had in more than a decade is, you guessed it, Cameron Diaz. It’s the exact kind of film that she’s easily elevated time and again, and she is just as charming today as she was when the otherwise forgettable “Sex Tape” came out. If you missed her, good news! She’s back, and that’s very nice. Now does anyone have a movie that actually deserves her?

The post ‘Back in Action’ Review: Cameron Diaz Is Finally Back (but She Deserves a Better Movie) appeared first on TheWrap.

That’s the puzzle of contradictions one must work through when attempting to unpack the new drama from Max.

“ER,” created by the late Michael Crichton, spent 15 seasons tracking the lives of various physicians (including superstar-in-waiting George Clooney as heartthrob Dr. Doug Ross) traipsing through the emergency room at Chicago’s County General. By contrast, “The Pitt,” from producer John Wells and creator R. Scott Gemmill, spends its 15-episode first season chronicling a single shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center in downtown Pittsburgh.

It offers compelling drama, written well and performed by a talented cast — ably anchored by the world-weary Noah Wyle, 30 years removed from his debut as wide-eyed Dr. Carter in the “ER” pilot. While this show’s complicated origin story makes it hard to view entirely separate from the legal logjam that led to its birth (currently the subject of litigation by the Crichton estate), it nonetheless benefits from the comforting familiarity of both premise and star.

Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. He’s a compassionate and driven physician tasked with improving efficiency and patient satisfaction in his ER — two goals seemingly at cross-purposes. With Robby overseeing veteran doctors and fresh med students, every hour presents a series of crises at the Pitt (the unflattering nickname given to the emergency room by its workers).

It’s a testament to how familiar and beloved Wyle is, not only as a screen presence more broadly but specifically in this kind of role, that he slips into some very familiar scrubs and carries viewers along without further explanation needed.

There’s unquestionable dissonance from watching Wyle as an ER doc not named John Carter. It feels a little bit like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger play a barbarian not named Conan in 1985’s “Red Sonja.” And while “The Pitt” stands head, shoulders and torso above that execrable camp confection, there’s still some compass-setting required before a string of medical situations — some comical and some calamitous — pull the audience in.

It’s not like hospital dramas are unexplored terrain on the TV landscape, so most of the proceedings have an unavoidable air of familiarity. But perhaps the most significant innovation comes from the fact that as a streaming series, there’s more viscera and nudity than you’ll see in an average episode of “Chicago Med” or “Grey’s Anatomy.”

And while there are aspects to the show that are more episodic, with minor cases flitting in and out of the emergency room, given that this is essentially one season-long story there are several plotlines that play out over several installments, including the plight of an increasingly frustrated patient (Drew Powell) who sits in the waiting room like a pot of water on a hot stovetop. There’s also the conflict between hotshot resident Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) and hotshot intern Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), another pot of water boiling across the season.

Still, this is ultimately a showcase for Wyle, with his character threading through various plotlines (along with some terrific camera work lending it a verité feel). He may not be playing Dr. Carter, but he’s undoubtedly leaning into the accrued affinity that comes from being identified with that character. With a wariness on his face and compassion in his eyes, Robby is a vulnerable and compelling center of the action — just like Carter on “ER” all those decades ago — with hints of a tragic backstory only alluded to initially.

Sadly (if unavoidably), the “ER” legacy is forever intertwined with “The Pitt.” That’s not so much a knock on the latter show as an acknowledgment of the former’s outsized role as a TV trailblazer. All medical dramas afterward will face some comparison with it. While those comparisons are perhaps more front of mind here than usual, this is nonetheless a solid series that underscores the somewhat paradoxical reality that sometimes the emergency room is the most comfortable place for TV viewers.

“The Pitt” premieres Thursday, Jan. 9, at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Max.

The post ‘The Pitt’ Review: Noah Wyle Brings Comfort to Max’s Chaotically Fun ER Drama appeared first on TheWrap.

“American Primeval” certainly thinks so. The new six-part Netflix series helmed by “Friday Night” Lights director Peter Berg and written by “The Revenant’s” Mark L. Smith, “American Primeval” revels in its own muck. A fictionalized account of life out west around the 1857 Utah War, which pitted the U.S. Army against Brigham Young’s Mormon militia, “American Primeval” is a dirty but delicate web of intrigue and brutality sparked by a mother and child’s quest to find safety and escape a bounty.

Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota star as that mother and son, Sara and Devin Rowell, and endure countless injustices over the course of the series, from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which masked Mormons and Paiute auxiliaries killed about 120 Westbound pioneers, to wolf attacks, deathly cold and abuse at the hands of sinister French madmen. That’s not even getting into downright evil bounty hunters, broken bones, bucking horses and all of the pair’s everyday trauma, a mere fraction of which would force most of us modern citizens into a shuddering ball.

That’s not to say they don’t have help. Taylor Kitsch plays Isaac, a white man raised by the Shoshone who’s so emotionally shut down after the death of his own family that he practically communicates in grunts. He begrudgingly ends up helping the Rowells and a mute Shoshone girl, Shawnee Pourier’s Two Moons, with the foursome forming a rather motley crew along their route west.

There’s other drama elsewhere in “American Primeval,” as well, like Shea Whigham’s Jim Bridger attempting to hold things down at his historic fort in Wyoming despite looming threats from Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and his Mormon mercenaries, and the plight of a young Mormon couple, Jacob and Abish Pratt (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who are separated (and scalped) during the Meadows Massacre and spend the rest of the series trying to find each other. While Jacob is hell-bent on finding his wife, Abish ends up falling in with the Shoshone group that took her, finding common ground with Derek Hinkey’s Red Feather, a fierce warrior, and his mother, Irene Bedard’s Winter Bird. As Abish, Lightfoot-Leon gets to deliver some of the show’s most uncloaked moral messages, speaking out against hatred, fear and killing under the guise of religion.

Much of the on-screen violence of “American Primeval” was created with practical effects, a fact that’s both impressive and somewhat horrific given what viewers end up seeing. Shot over about six months in the New Mexico wilderness, often in intense cold, the show does seem to radiate strife, along with a sort of itchy, dirty woolen feeling. There are no beautiful, sweeping vistas or shots of wildflowers before they’re trampled by oxen.

Berg and Smith’s on-screen vision is all pain with very little relief, making a binge-watch of this series a bit of a masochistic exercise. Knowing that the show employed an enormous amount of help to ensure what it captured was as real as possible, including indigenous cultural consultants and Mormon and military experts, is impressive but almost makes things worse.

There’s no Hollywood sugar-coating these atrocities, and watching “American Primeval” will only serve to make you more aware of how much mud, blood and brutal, overconfident delusion it took to create the country we live in today.

“American Primeval” is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘American Primeval’ Review: Netflix’s Violent Western Plays Like a Masochistic Binge appeared first on TheWrap.

The pedigreed eight-part show traded broadcast networks for Prime Video, where it will premiere Thursday. The novelty is that each episode is a bite-sized 30 minutes, with modest character arcs that extend over multiple episodes, and multiple seemingly random crime sequences that propel individual installments.

The result feels like “Cops” with a script. The ride-along series puts the audience largely behind the wheel with Traci Harmon (Troian Bellisario, a nepo baby, daughter of Donald P. who also fathered “NCIS,” “Magnum P.I.” and “Quantum Leap”). She’s a divorced surfer with a chip on her shoulder, a junkie sister and a troubled relationship with her fellows on the force. She’s wound as tight as her bun.

Riding shotgun is her trainee, the handsome newbie Alex Diaz (Brandon Larracuente). The young idealist is eager for the challenge, but he keeps leaping into the danger zone, ignoring the sage advice of his seen-too-much mentor/partner. Bullets will fly — but are they necessary?

The show, created under the Wolf umbrella by Dick’s nepo baby Elliot and co-pilot Tim Walsh, has left behind the big cities of New York and Chicago, for the oceanside Long Beach, Ca. It’s an interesting choice because the city south of Los Angeles is a hotbed of haves and have-nots that have little more in common than drug abuse.

In the mansions by the beach, the privileged sons and daughters of the rich party to the death without a sense of mortality. On the gritty Eastern side of town away from the Pacific, gangs circle with first-hand knowledge of slain brothers-and-sisters in arms, and an intense suspicion of the law.

“E.R.” star Eriq La Salle appears in seven of the eight episodes as the supporting character Sarge, Sergeant Lasman. La Salle also directed the pilot and multiple episodes. His direction is adequate but his character never really pops.

Uniformed officers Harmon and Diaz work together under endlessly unnerving circumstances that, in the cop show tradition, their significant others can’t possibly understand. The ultimate fear: death out of the blue. In the pilot, a policewoman makes a routine traffic stop, finding a parolee behind the wheel, an unresponsive young woman in the passenger seat — and in the backseat a jumpy gangmember who we come to learn is nicknamed Maniac. Faster than you can drive through McDonald’s, he shoots the woman in blue in the carotid. Surprised, she falls, blood pumping out of her neck as a group of locals take phone camera pictures and no one steps up to help as the felon’s car screeches off.

This sense of danger — that any routine traffic stop could end in death — on the sunny streets doesn’t let up. Over multiple episodes, the central partners pursue Maniac, shaking up the hornet’s nest that is the local gang scene and riling the bald crime boss Smokey (Lobo Sebastian). Meanwhile, the officers encounter resistance back at the police station where Harmon remains persona non grata after a past incident where she crossed the thin blue line.

While the female-driven series apparently hopes to break the network model and embrace streaming — all eight episodes can easily be consumed with potato chips in a single evening — it doesn’t break new ground. It’s akin to “Dragnet” — nothing but the facts — or the original “Hawaii Five-0” or “Adam-12.”

The real weakness is the characters’ softness and lack of complexity. Harmon hoards her secrets with a perpetually stiff upper lip, which occasionally winces in laughter. The naïve but athletic Diaz. The cipher that is the Sergeant. And Lori Loughlin also returns to series television as a grimace of a lieutenant following her involvement in the Varsity Blues scandal. They all seem like shades of police officers from television shows past.

With a plethora of original “Law & Orders” airing in an addictive nonstop loop, I remain a sucker for the original series pairings. The new “On Call” characters have plenty of runway to make strong impressions, but they pale in comparison to standouts Jerry Orbach, Jesse L. Martin and Dennis Farina, as well as the indelible characters of Kathryn Erbe, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Noth, Julianne Nicholson, Saffron Burrows and Annabella Sciorra of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

The writing, too, is intentionally spare, lacking the wit and barbed one-liners of the older one-hour shows. There are memorable sequences: a mob takeover of an intersection that’s challenging to contain, particularly with civilian cell phones turned on the police to monitor their every move; incidents of domestic violence where the police are summoned only to find themselves in the crossfire of the related combatants; back-alley foot chases with echoes of Kathryn Bigelow’s groundbreaking surfer noir “Point Break” and a shootout at a sleazy motel.

These aren’t particularly bad cops, but they’re not as compelling as they need to be to break through in a flooded marketplace. While the Wolf pack named the series “On Call,” don’t feel the obligation to put it on speed dial.

“On Call” premieres Thursday, Jan. 9 on Prime Video.

The post ‘On Call’ Review: Dick Wolf’s Prime Video Police Drama Won’t Reinvent the Genre appeared first on TheWrap.

The new Netflix documentary “Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” actually alludes to that at one point, but that might be a bit of a stretch.

From its inception in 1991, Jerry Springer’s daytime talk show kept audiences on their feet with outrageous stories that appeared to be ripped from supermarket tabloids. That’s no coincidence: Within the first few minutes of the doc, you find out that the executive producer, Richard Dominick, was a former writer for the Sun and Weekly World News. Moreover, you learn that Springer would likely have never become Springer were it not for Dominick’s vision — for better or worse.

But it didn’t all start out like that. The first 20 minutes of this two-part documentary highlight the old Jerry. The serious Jerry. The Jerry who was once Mayor of Cincinnati and who won multiple regional Emmy awards for his news commentary. It’s surprising to hear that the King of Trash TV was such a buttoned up, reputable journalist and politician then. Then again, Jerry was the most “normal” aspect of his show. He was the voice of reason. So reasonable, in fact, that when his “serious” talk show began tanking in the ratings, he was open to doing literally whatever he could to ensure he would become a success.

From there, the first episode (much like the show itself) dives into what led to the show’s turn into the scandalous daytime chat circus it became, with insight from Dominick as well as other “Springer” insiders like producers Melinda Chait Mele, Annette Grundy, and Tobias Yoshimura. Headlines like “I Refuse to Wear Clothes,” “Diaper Bob,” “I Married A Horse,” and “Klanfrontation!” Snippets of guests revealing shocking surprises in various states of dress. And yes, plenty of fights — the same ones that really put “Jerry Springer” on the same playing field as the Queen of Talk Shows, Oprah. Oh, and they make it clear that Ms. Winfrey was clearly not a “Springer” fan.

Like many recent documentaries about once-beloved shows, this docuseries also sheds some light into bits of behind-the-scenes exploitation. There are revelations into how intensely overworked the producers were, and some of the general fear around EP Dominick. But the series also goes further to showcase the twisted ways in which guests were treated, hyping them up to scream and fight just before going out on stage, and even refusing to fly them back home if they decided they didn’t want to participate in the full episode.

By Episode 2, the series goes headfirst into some of the more impactful catastrophes brought on by Springer, namely the murder of a former guest at the hands of her ex not long after their episode aired on national television. Those of us who watched Springer in real time know that little to no thought was given to the very real people whose lives were affected by going on the show and airing their dirty laundry. To hear from the son of the murdered guest and how it affected his life was an important addition to this documentary, which could have just as easily continued to make a spectacle of Springer guests.

All in all, the only thing missing from this docuseries is hearing from Jerry Springer himself. The man whose name was chanted every weekday for 27 years passed away from pancreatic cancer in April 2023. Unable to speak for himself, it would have been nice to include a few more clips from past interviews to get more of an understanding of his take on the show. That said, there’s rarely an ill word spoken of him throughout both episodes, so maybe it’s not entirely necessary.

“Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” is clearly made for everyone who chose to spend a few hours now and then watching the worst of humanity bare its soul on national television in the 90s. It was a show that came about at the right time, before everyone had a camera in their pocket ready to record the next big, shocking thing. And while it’s a bit much to blame it for the “Idiocracy” we keep moving toward, it definitely had a significant impact in pushing the culture toward more shock, violence and, well, trash. Can you really blame them for giving the people what they wanted?

“Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action” premieres Tuesday, January 7 on Netflix.

The post ‘Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action’ Review: Netflix Scratches the Surface of America’s Trashiest Talk Show appeared first on TheWrap.

Foremost, the Ben Stiller-backed, 2022 Apple TV+ series was such a brilliantly realized paranoid thriller/sci-fi satire of the work-life balance illusion — recreating its first season magic would be a herculean task under the best circumstances.

Then there were reports that creator Dan Erickson and more experienced co-showrunner Mark Friedman weren’t getting along to such an extent that “House of Cards” veteran Beau Willimon was brought in to smooth out the follow-up’s trajectory. Hollywood strikes notwithstanding, production delays also seemed ominous.

Whatever went down, Season 2 finally premieres Jan. 17. And while there’s more than a bit of wheel-spinning in its first few episodes, saying “Aha, I knew it!” will make you sound like a clueless Outie guessing what goes down on a Lumon Industries severed floor. The new season explores profound ideas about what having one’s consciousness split inside and out of the office means for the individuals who agreed to let a corporation surgically bifurcate their memories — and, as a result, their growingly divergent personalities.

After a few delays and typically obfuscating, “official” exposition, the MicroData Refinement division members find their way back to the carrel quad where they move numbers around computer screens all day.

In the wake of the Innies’ harrowing escape to their Outies’ minds at the end of last season, Adam Scott’s Mark Scout is at various times aware that mysterious wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) is actually the wife he’s long thought dead. Mark has to cope with the increasingly urgent mission of finding and rescuing her from Lumon’s labyrinth of white hallways (and darker, more claustrophobic ones). Of course, his feelings for coworker Helly (Britt Lower) complicate that.

It’s hard to say whether Scott is at his complex best when trying to work out Mark’s feelings for Helly on the spot or manipulating and arguing among his various selves. Either way, it’s the most powerful portrayal since Bill Hader’s “Barry” of a disoriented soul by an actor who’s also the show’s key comedian.

Lower has an excellent poker face, especially when what’s behind it may be the face of corporate evil (You’ll recall Helly’s Outie was outed at the end of last season as Helena Eagan, scion of the family that owns Lumon). Yet while she can effortlessly make us forget whether we’re watching Helena or Helly, she doesn’t let us lose sight of either’s wants and needs for long. Each version finds herself in situations that require additional masks upon masks. Lower makes 3-D chess-style acting seem like the most natural thing in the world.

We learn a lot more about Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) Outie life and his Innie’s deeper feelings; both are near-unbearably poignant. While he plays a key role in the office politics of Season 2, John Turturro’s Irving really develops out in wintry gray Kier, the company town named after Lumon’s godlike founder. We also learn more about Irving’s office crush Burt, one of Christopher Walken’s tenderest characterizations (who, typically, he manages to make somewhat sinister all the same).

While still menacing in their distinctive, inscrutable ways, we see far more of severed floor supervisors Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Seth Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) tensions with their deity-like employers, and what that does to their own senses of themselves.

The impressive list of new hires includes Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever (as usual, a nexus of emotional intelligence), Robby Benson (his aged face particularly ravaged, which suits the character he plays), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, James Le Gros and John Noble. And those are just the famous S2 players we’ve not been instructed to keep secret.

Though the latest batch of episodes boasts fairly relentless spoofing of corporate culture (especially with Lumon’s new, post-Innie breakout agenda of concern for employee welfare), the metaphors lean more toward expanding weird lore than satirizing worker abuse. The extent of Kier-worshipping and importance placed on the MacGuffin-sounding “Cold Harbor” initiative this time around can feel like too much of some not so interesting things. Yet just as you fret that this profoundly intelligent show is heading the way of “X-Files,” “Lost” and countless other WTF series that crawl so far into world-building fantasy they lose sight of any point (or resolution), an episode will go deeper rather than just weirder.

Existential connundra related to Innie/Outie individuality — each iteration’s rights to their own lives, personae and relationships — is examined extensively. Several episodes take an abstract, feelings-forward approach; they’re interiors beyond inside out dialectics, if you will, and quite unlike anything the humor- and plot-driven first season addressed.

Location and some fine formal deviations add welcome variety to the Lumon-Kier monotony that, after all, is a defining feature of “Severance.” Gorgeous noir shadows appear in most episodes, which is doubly impressive for a show about overlit workspaces. Facial closeups are favored by Stiller and the other directors this season; they emphasize how the focus is on characters’ personal needs more than their situational reality this time around. There’s a spectacular night-on-the-severed-floor montage that leads to some climactic realizations. Theodore Shapiro’s remains the most bone-rattling score on television.

Still, nothing in Season 2 matches the orchestral cinematic majesty of S1’s closing chapter, “The Way We Are.” There may be something different that’s just as good, though, something more romantic than we’d expect from “Severance.” All four members of the MDR unit get mired in love triangles, even quadrangles, in and out of the office space. Each is heart-wrenching in its unique way.

Some of Erickson, Friedman and Willimon’s most thoughtful calculations have gone into working out the split personalities’ affections. If that’s the kind of job a contentious writers room produces, they’ve got to figure out a way to make that industry policy.

“Severance” Season 2 premieres Friday, Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.

The post ‘Severance’ Season 2 Review: Apple TV+ Drama Exceeds Herculean Expectations After a Long Wait appeared first on TheWrap.

A bomb aboard the plane was responsible for the carnage. The search for answers continues to this day, as American authorities are set to hold a federal trial for the latest suspect in the bombing that created the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the UK. The hunt for justice has left deep divisions between the victims’ families, and one advocate in particular, at the center of this Peacock miniseries, came to represent the knotty and obsessive hunt for the truth.

“How can you, of all people, prepare to be in the same room as him,” a particularly forward prison guard asks Dr. Jim Swire (Colin Firth) in the opening scene when he sits down to talk to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), who served time for the bombing while maintaining his innocence. It was the death of Swire’s daughter Flora in the bombing that led him to become one of the most vocal and oft-controversial figures in the aftermath. Before her murder, Swire was a normal middle-class doctor who loved his family, did house calls, and kept a stiff upper lip.

The destruction across Lockerbie, with debris crushing the town and leaving people’s homes in flames, is shown with brutal impact, as residents stand in shock at the wreckage of what was once their community. It’s a true vision of hell, with ash raining down from the skies and piles of bodies left in the ice rink for lack of more appropriate facilities. Bodies hang from trees. It’s a detailed and technically impressive set-piece that may nonetheless prove too much for those who remember the all-too-recent tragedy. Such is the eternal conundrum when depicting true-life events such as this: how far is too far in the name of combining reality with entertainment? Are scenes of dismembered limbs scored to dramatic strings at risk of turning this pain into something mawkish? The use of news footage from the era to show the accuracy of the production’s recreation only adds to the unease.

In the aftermath, Dr. Swire has no patience for the mandated peace of the mourning period. At a memorial service, he comes close to chewing out a politician whose non-answers infuriate him. While there, he meets Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), a local journalist with good intentions but iffy tactics, who serves as a handy expository vehicle for Swire. Guthrie eats chips in his car while listening to Deacon Blue, just so you know he’s really Scottish (perhaps a kilt would have been too much.) He becomes Swire’s right-hand man as well as the mouthpiece for the audience to get some of the trickier details of this very complex case. He’s also a fictional character created solely to fulfil this narrative purpose, which makes Troughton’s performance all the more misguided. He’s acting like the outsider journalist in a shady noir, sneaking into people’s homes to use their phones after scurrying through crime scenes and looking corpses in the eye. In a show that seems so earnest in its hunt for authenticity, often to a fault, this character seems like a mistake. Again, we come up against the intrinsic issues of fictionalizing history, one so recent that its details are still fresh in the minds of millions.

The rather hackneyed subtitle to this drama is “A Search for Truth” not “The Search”, because said truth has never been uncovered. The Lockerbie case is one that remains mired in conspiracy and diplomatic strife, and Dr. Swire’s hunt for answers proved to leave more questions than solutions. Firth, who remains the king of the stoic Englishman on screens big and small, does some of his finest work as a nice normal man pushed to fervor by grief and fury. Dr. Swire, like his work in “A Single Man” and “The King’s Speech”, is a figure who has long grown tired of maintaining a sense of so-called decorum, even if the occasion calls for it. The way he barely holds himself together when he sees his daughter’s body for the first time is heart-wrenching. Typical Firth stuff, then, which is handy since the show often struggles to create a full sense of this fascinating and complicated man. There’s so much history to cover, so much pain amid dense details, that it feels as though even our protagonist struggles to find his footing.

And there is a lot to get into, from Dr. Swire taking a flight with a fake bomb to prove the lax security at airports to fears of a cover-up to the convening of victims’ families groups where Dr. Swire becomes a spokesperson. A lot of information is conveyed as quickly as possible, usually through unnatural-sounding dialogue that frequently feels like readings of the Wikipedia page. Dr. Swire’s wife becomes resigned to the role of sad spouse as the endless battle for answers takes its toll on his family. The most fascinating scenes come when Dr. Swire finds himself at odds with other families who believe that the authorities got the right man when they arrested al-Megrahi, a decision that he would publicly condemn.

The series does capture the frustrating cycle of non-answers that continues to plague the case, exacerbated by the shroud of secrecy with tendrils that climb all the way to the top of the power pyramid. In Britain, many critics have compared the show to another recent miniseries about a miscarriage of justice, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” That show delved into a scandal involving one of the country’s most beloved institutions and how a computer error led to hundreds of Post Office employees being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Like Dr. Swire, Mr. Alan Bates was a steadfast soldier for the truth, and his efforts led to major change. Unlike Swire, however, there was an obvious villain for Bates to focus on. Swire and his fellow advocates remain in a Kafka-esque spiral of bureaucracy, redacted documents, and unresolved trauma. It is in this quandary where “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is able to shine amid the muddle. The pain of not knowing is vastly more agonizing than what closure can bring.

It’s not that “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is bad. Much of it is strikingly put together and Firth’s performance buoys those moments of emotion with skill and empathy. You can tell that the creative team, including Scottish playwright David Harrower and director Otto Bathurst, care deeply about doing this well. But there’s so much to cover in so little time, and even the deftest workers can be smothered by the tangled realities of making gripping TV out of the deaths of 270 people.

When the show cuts to the devastating news footage of the actual event, one can’t help but wonder if a documentary would have made more sense for telling this still-important story.

“Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” premieres Thursday, Jan. 2, on Peacock.

The post ‘Lockerbie: A Search for Truth’ Review: Peacock Series Is Overwhelmed by Britain’s Conspiracy-Heavy Tragedy appeared first on TheWrap.