aka_sabretooth

Just as playing the piano is not pressing your fingers on the keys, making cinema is not about filming people do things, no matter the budget. OK, ALERT! NO spoilers needed really, this was just terrible. If you came thinking this would be an awesome (or at least good) western w Kurt Russel then you are as wrong as if you thought visiting Auschwitz in 2020 would be like visiting an amusement park. A far cry, really. Sadly, it took me an hour to realize I was watching the wrong movie. It is sad to realize, retrospectively of course, that the producer could have told the writer to redo the script into a parody like TROPIC THUNDER (2008). Because it is the type of story that is parodied in Tropic Thunder, or maybe even worse: here we have disenfranchised characters no one really cares about, dull dialogue, boring scenes, lack of common sense, and mindless fake gore. But the mysteries of the cinema industry managed to produce this as it came. One way to redeem this is to leave it to film cannibals that can edit it, add a funny commentary, and rehash it into a ten minutes comedy.

Which is an odd choice to kick start the series. Because "Savage Season" was originally not part of the Hap and Leonard book series, it was a stand alone novel with the characters appearing first time ever. What would become known as the "Hap and Leonard Book Series" started with the intense mystery, amateur sleuth books like "Mucho Mojo" and "The Two Bear Mambo", and the rest is history. While the book series has ups and lows as any series, I never got tired of reading all of them.

The TV series is almost I would say dedicated to new and old fans of the books, the casting and the details are all there, so while Joe Lansadale's prose is gone it is a hell of a treat for readers that can approach an on-the-screen version. I am unable to tell how this TV series will sit to newcomers, because the plot ruminates deeply on themes that prevailed in Savage Season (i.e. the idealism of the 60s, and its reverberations into the late 80s) but were lately abandoned in the books which became their own distinct brand of crime mystery novels. And that is unfair as I am leaving out a lot of themes in the novels, really.

So give it a try, and if it lets you down just wait until the second arc comes out. If they adapt Mucho Mojo as it is hinted... or The Two Bear Mambo, or any other book with Hap and Leonard the plot will be much more intense and focused than this one, and the potential to rival with other mystery TV series like "True Detective".