Shefhammer

There's some good stuff here and it's laugh out loud funny at times but the success rate of the gags is not as high as in the first two movies nor the TV series that spawned them. When it veers into the supernatural, which it does twice, it's just annoying rather than funny and the writers / director also lean a little too heavily on high(ish) budget set pieces rather than clever joke telling. Neeson and Anderson are well cast and the nods to the originals are welcome. There are some good running gags and the visual humour is good.

I would say the jokes relying on word play are thinner than the originals and even a little dumbed down. An example would be when Drebbin says "Would you like to take a chair" and Davenport says "No, I have a lot of chairs at home." The punchline would have been written as "No, I already have plenty" back in '88. Or the villain says "cigar?" This Drebbin responds "it certainly looks like one." A decent joke but no match at all for Nielsen's "I know" when they ran that joke back in the day. These are subtle differences but they ever so slightly spoil the jokes. What's lacking is more dead pan humour, more gags relying on clever writing and a set piece to rival the baseball sequence in the original. There's no equivalent in this but it's still a decent effort, if one that feels a bit more like a first draft than a polished final.

I watched 4 episodes and I can't believe I did but there is at least a kernel of intrigue that makes me continue to hate watch. The acting is woeful from nearly everyone involved and especially the leads. The dialogue makes me want to question my sanity. How on earth did this get commissioned when so many talented writers don't. You get predict the beats from miles away. Literally nothing is convincing from the Math savant who is supposed to be socially awkward but can't really commit to that in his character so he just comes across as a dick. To the assistant to the woman who goes to Iraq and gets hit on by a gay guy within about 10 seconds of landing. Yeah that's a common occurrence in Iraq - clever writing. To the NSA girl who ways 50kg who - of course - beats up actual paid grown men assailants with ease. Her surveillance is laughable in its randomness. She claims "something is off about that guy" and then can't explain what even though he's using a table cloth to return to his forbidden research.

None of the dialogue around Mathematics is remotely convincing.

Truly awful in nearly every respect. The locations are quite nice.

Losing interest rapidly. Ferguson is an absolute queen but even that isn't enough to sustain interest when the plotting is so glacial and the dialogue so tedious. Does Apple think it has discovered a new, superior way of lighting TV shows because I have news for them - they haven't. This and Succession are so dark at times you may as well just listen to it and switch off the visuals. There are literally scenes where 90% of the screen is total blackness. Which idiot thought that was a good idea and did they used to work in radio?

I like the premise but the characters are just not compelling enough to overcome a plot that is barely offering any interest at all. I'll give it one more episode and then unless things change, I'm out.