jdxcrow-49035

Son gets accused of murder, blah blah blah.

As a lawyer, it can sometimes be difficult to watch movies trying to tell stories taking place in the criminal justice system. This series is one of the worst offenders.

The first episode is very good, setting the bar perhaps a little too high in terms of setting the viewers' expectations.

Things start to go off the rails a little bit in the second episode. There are perhaps six or seven things that happen, decisions made either by lawyers or police officers, that are completely unrealistic. They aren't big things, but to have to so many this early makes one wonder if perhaps the series is going to end with something really majorly stupid. So at this point, my guard is up.

They did not disappoint. There is a trial. At one point, the prosecution ambushes the defence in a way that should have resulted in an immediate mistrial and sanctions against the prosecutor. That didn't happen, and for me it completely ruined the story. It's that unbelievable.

Unfortunately, they weren't finished. There is an entire additional episode similarly filled with stupid stuff.

It might be worth watching the first six episodes of this series. Chris Evans gives the performance of his career, and it would be a shame to miss it in its entirely. Maybe stop at the end of episode six, and just make up your own ending for the rest of it.

My best guess here is that the filmmakers wanted to make a movie about a notorious crime that took place in 1975. To the extent that they wanted to tell the story of this event, they failed. There is virtually no story of any sort told in this film. Several scenes show what can only be described as random anecdotes that occur to some of the characters, none of them having anything to do with each other or any overarching story.

The tone in which the film is made suggests that the director believed he was making a profound work with great gravitas, like Citizen Kane, where the layers of the onion are slowly peeled back to reveal the meaning of "Rosebud". Except here there is no onion, no layers, no "rosebud", and not even a sled.

Without giving anything away, in the last 20 minutes the movie goes from bad and boring to bad, boring, and upsetting.

If you like looking at scantily clad boys, the movie opens with the members of the boy's swim team doing calisthenics beside the pool wearing only their speedos.

Other than that there is no reason why anyone should want to watch this movie.

As it says in the header, rich kid gets kidnapped, rich mommy dearest marshals up the troops and five (four? Six?) Brits are thrown under the cloud of suspicion.

This is actually really well done for the most part, given how incredibly stupid much of the writing is. Time and time again, characters make decisions that can only be explained by the fact that if they had acted sensibly, there wouldn't be any story left to tell. That's the kind of thing you can get away with when you have a multitude of very strong performances who do an excellent job of selling their characters. The only one who doesn't nail it is Uma Thurman. She has a near-impossible role to deliver here, and the result is what looks like an attempt to recreate her character of (bleep) from Kill Bill vol. 1, minus the Hattori Hanzo samurai sword.

The first seven episodes are definitely a solid 6/10, popcorn-eating binge fare for a rainy weekend. My recommendation would be to stop at seven, and just make up something in your head for the last episode. Like, it's a Shakespearean tragedy where everyone dies except Noah Emmerich's character, leaving him to recite the last pithy couplet.

If you go ahead and watch the last episode, you will regret it, I promise you.