Film Filmesen
Warning: This show is mediocre in every aspect, from the story to the production, from the script to the acting/directing. The premise is interesting enough. Mother Laura looses her daughter Serena, kills herself in sorrow and wakes up before the murder. How does she prevent it?Sadly, too much is thrown into the mix, like a kid making a cake for the first time. The story is bloated with repetition, random subplots and obstacles. Two times allergy is used a a plot device. Two times Serena befriends a seemingly bad guy. Two times our hero's car is rendered unusable in crucial moments, towed one time and wheel-clamped another. Seriously? Stuff like this is just frustrating to watch and only serves to make a 90 minute plot fill 400 minutes.The story gets unnecessarily intricate and involves, besides Laura and Serena, a cheating husband, an estranged grandmother, a rough investigator/ex cop, his assistant and dead girlfriend, her dead mother, several other dead women, a serial killer teacher, a corrupt cop, a police chief, an innocent man on death row, his mother and daughter, the governor, his wife, son and foster son, the governor's fixer, some thugs, and...a pop star, which happens to be Serena's idol and also connected to the core murder that started it all ten years ago.The bloated, haphazard story makes the script suffer as well. It's tediously packed with information to remind the audience of what's going on, and the actors stumbles in their words because they have to say it all in half a second. Take this remarkably long line, for example: "What would you say if I told you that somebody who might be the man who shot Haskell Debray just brought my husband a photograph that he lied about and then shredded."Even the writers know that this is bad, for the next line is: "I'd say watch the run-on sentences." But going meta has to be smart in order to work. You don't do it just to patch a bad script. And to make the patching even worse: That isn't a run-on sentence, just a lot one packed with relative clauses.Speaking of grammar, in the middle of a fight there's an argument over who/whom. Again: Seriously?Overall, the show tries to be smart, but isn't. It's also ridden with cliches. The most unforgivable one is the use of forensic show style image zoom that got old years ago. But the private investigator explains why this time it HAS to work, for completely irrelevant reasons:"I can hit three buttons right now and tell you what street vendor in Shanghai serves the juiciest sheng jian bao. NASA can tell me what every rock on every moon of Jupiter has for lunch. Somewhere out there, there is software that can pull an image out of that blur and save a little girl's life."Yeah, right. Conveniently, his partner finds a program that can extract image data from an image where there are none to extract. Just like the investigator conveniently knows who tattooed some guys on a photo conveniently placed on the murderer's piano. It's all too convienent all the time.Technically, there are too much overdubbed dialogue, and the camera work is corny. There are many close ups, and they all seem fake and slowed down and breaks the rhythm. The special effects look horribly fake as well. Like, don't write in explosions when you can't afford them. And get this: At one point, two characters say their line simultaneosly, and one of them reacts with looking down while suppressing a smile. Someone decided to keep this in. That's how amateurish this show is.Beside all its shortcomings, the show's main fault is not managing to establish a constant mood. It's a show about desperation, but often gets too feel-goody. That's due to stuff like the who/whom joke, but mostly due to the Serena character. She is written as a comedy character, always saying cheeky one-liners. She's in a way above the story and steals the show. This undermines the story and her mother's struggle to save her.And the other characters? The writers try to bring some life into them e.g. by having Serena being a vegetarian, Serena's father referencing Lord of the Rings and Nico saying all kinds of cool stuff, and that he loves Freddy Mercury. Problem is, all the character traits seem misplaced and forced. Maybe because they're all told, not shown. Or because the acting is not convincing. So yeah. This was a long rant, but hopefully you'll save 400 minutes by not watching a mediocre show. Or you could watch it and learn from its mistakes.
nazaretdreef
It would be an excellent mini-series if it weren't for the bad acting of the leading actresses. Paula Patton acts over-concerned, over-punitively or over-loving all the time, this is really an example of overacting. She is not even good enough for a role in a B-movie like she acts here.Then the kid, Serena, if I should call her a kid: she is a smart ass. That might be the role she has to take on, but she is so arrogant, that you don't even feel sorry for her when something would happen to her. Like, wow, luckily the little brat is gone. The side characters and the leading men actors were very good and realistic. They made me watch the series till the end.
