bertrandma

For a film to be so bad it's good, it actually need to be good in some regards and very, very bad in others (just plain bad is never bad enough to be so bad it's good.) A Working Man comes pretty close to be so bad it's good.

It is so cliché-ridden that I cannot but wonder how much of it was done on purpose. The palm goes to a cast of Russian gangsters each more laughable than the other--rich, vulgar, cynical, violent toward women and with a taste for kitschy nightclubs--but the real innovation is the titular Working Man: To be clear, this is your average cookie-cutter action hero (gruff but big hearted, retired special forces with a lingering esprit de corps, etc.) but the emphasis is on his working class credentials. Proletarian masculinity has been fetishized for some time (remember the Village People?) but here manual work is elevated to some ancient arcane discipline: the construction worker as Shaolin monk, or something like that. Unfortunately this romanticised workerism takes the back seat because the second half is wholly taken up with killing inane Russians wrapped in floral-patterned tracksuits, but I do hope we will get more construction-site action heroes in the future.

Long ago streaming platforms impressed us because they seemed to take more risk than the big national networks. Ten years later, we've come to realize they don't 'take risk' so much as they cater to niches (YA urban fantasy, rural bodice-ripper-whodunit, arty hip-hop rags-to-riches, etc.) which are by now well and truly ossified. Scroll through Netflix and you'll have to agree the vast majority of its offering is basically subcultural trash. But such imitative propensity also has its flipside: Long Bright River suggest we might soon start getting 'HBO clones'--character studies with social aspirations, disguised as thrillers or procedural. That is my niche, if I have to chose one.

LBR starts with both a bang and whimper: the bang is its general setting (patrol policing Philadelphia's homeless addicts), which is painted in broad, energetic strokes, keeping the spectator interested with its folklore and raw details. The whimper is the police station which, save for our solitary female protagonist, is a grotesque assortment of adipose, white, working-class men. Cops missing any of those attributes invariably turn into love interests and/or benevolent deus ex machina.

For better or for worse, those traits will remain the series defining feature. The writing team is largely female, and this shows in good and bad ways: the female protagonist is complex, well observed and well written (and flawlessly acted by Amanda Seyfried). The many sex workers are similarly distinctive, often brutal, and yet convincingly feminine. Unfortunately some of the secondary characters are less satisfying, particularly the often one-dimensional male ones (the exception being Gee, perhaps John Doman's best performance yet.) The result is lopsided gritty realism, that is often riveting but can sometimes feel conventional or even preachy.

The plot itself is good but not great, which is quite fitting for 'street-level' cop work: the detective work mostly occur off-screen, and once revealed, killer's plot turns out to be a little underwhelming. A thread of melodrama runs throughout, which is largely kept under control until the last third of the series, where I often resented the intrusion of rather soapy family drama into the otherwise well-plotted, fast-paced and sharply written crime story.

But despite letting this sentimentality sometimes overstepping the bounds of good taste, it remains the characters which are the true stars of the show: great dialogues, credible costumes, good and sometimes excellent acting (despite a 'prettified' casting).

There's not that much good TV out there at the moment, so if you like a gritty, socially conscious procedural, do treat yourself with Long Bright River.

From afar it vaguely looks like meat, but from up close you can tell its assembled from bits and pieces unfit for human consumption. The series had its moments, but this is just plain ol' bad. All the cringey bits of the series have been retained (Boon & Mill romance, awkward erotica, embarrassing one-liners, useless sidekicks, etc.) but all the good bits have been excised: all characters are one-dimensional and interchangeable, the plot is painfully both predictable and full of holes, the twists are telegraphed and tepid, etc.

The action scenes are not particularly good, but they are by far the best this has to offer: as with much Netflix US-made animation, the art is bland and the animation cheap. Here the fights are numerous enough that the team manage to even make them repetitive. The most successful ones are those relying on cell-shaded 3d.