Kremen. Osvobozhdenie

For those who are as bored as I was with offerings available on Amazon Prime, this provided a decent few hours of entertainment and I'm glad I took the time to watch it.

This series is a sequel to Flint (also known as Kremen). Honestly, I enjoyed the original more than the sequel but there is enough combat action in this one to make it interesting as well. One would probably enjoy this sequel more if they have already watched the original.

The main character is sort of a Russian version of Rambo, only this guy is a far superior warrior. It also reminded me somewhat of the movie Sin City. This TV series is not animated like Sin City but some of the characters do have similar levels of character development (i.e., not much) and similar levels of exaggerated graphic novel or comic book characteristics.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. It says it is a series, but I can only find one season. The plot and action are straight out of Hollywood, but there is a very different attitude. Yes, the bodies pile up beyond counting them, but Andrei's love affair with his knife and nature make him a three-dimensional character. And Nastya is quiet, gorgeous, tough, and worthy of being his girl. She is no Wonder Woman, but a very human survivor, just like he is. I wish there were more with these characters, or if there is I wish it was more readily available to us Americans.

In between the end of Season One and this follow up, the character of Andre Shamanov seems to have become a male Bene Gesserit. We get a load of sub Frank Herbert gibberish about how to be a killing machine as well as, within the attacks, communion with earth, knife and leaves to outguess adversaries that are meant to be every bit as skilled (or "gifted" as the somewhat clunky translation has it) as him.

A word about the translations. Some parts of the programmes are in English and a wretched Lektor is used to speak over them. This was incredibly annoying as parts of these dialogues were not subtitled until the last episode. The English overall needed tidying up.

André Shamanov has lost his reluctance to kill grunts and low-ranked cops since the first season. This could be because the themes here are darker. Conniving in bribery, corruption and the occasional assault in season one was nothing compared to helping the nefarious activities of the wicked antagonists of season two. So the rookies were complicit in something much more shady.

The kill rate was in the hundreds. Shamanov has learnt to dodge bullets since last time and to exterminate every opponent leaving himself unscathed.

It's utter tosh but I watched it all. I have to say that I enjoyed it less than season one as it was really too over the top.

It's not that bad, the series has the makings to be quite good, my main problem is that this guy is some sort of elite soldier and he's breaking into heavily guarded security complex's, you'd think they would have some sort of training well not these guys... Do you remember when you bought a game as a kid, you'd get home all excited start up your console and set the difficulty level on ultra easy, all the soldiers walked around aimlessly and never shot you until you emptied a magazine into them and then they would still miss....welcome to Rambo ultra easy. It's quite disappointing that he has no real challenge. The cute psycho girl was completely pointless which is a shame because she was quite interesting like a Russian Harley Quinn.

In fact, and with what is happening in this warlike and deadly world, I refused to watch Russian films, series and even read Russian novels, but I said to myself "let's not mix art with politics" and I started looking for this film-series whose trailer I saw on a rather run-down social network, and for me, it is an excellent series if we take into account its origin and acting experience. Both the decent and sometimes very good performances of the team, added to the subtitles (Spanish-Castilian: congratulations to the author of the translation), open our minds a little and we recognize that not everything is centered on three versions of FBI (USA), a failed Seal Team and supernumerary and boring products of the same origin plus the Tarantinos that flood our televisions with blood. My opinion: highly recommended.