ligonlaw

There is so much badly done in this series it is difficult to know where to begin.

The story is told in frequent flashbacks. This series could be the poster child in how not to do flashbacks. Too many, too clumsy and too confusing. The younger actors do not really look like the older ones so you have to remind yourself who you are watching.

The drama is flaccid. There is an evil presence somewhere but we know it is there primarily from the paranoia of the principals. So you are not centered and you don't know who is who part of the time. The motives that drive these characters are shadowy and not precise.

The principals do stupid things repeatedly. There is a pile of money that they keep forgetting about as it goes to someone else. Maybe it's important but maybe the billionaire doesn't really care about it.

The writing is unfocused, and the story gets away from them.

The acting talent for this movie is top-notch - Nicole Kidman, Matthew MacConaughey, John Cusak, and Zac Efron. All of these actors have been in much better films. There were instances of over-acting but the fault lies not in the acting. The script was awful. It was written for the melodramatic moments, but the script missed the point of so many scenes. Human motivation is not always even or logical, but these characters were not drawn from believable human behavior. It was a mess.

Nicole Kidman played against type in this one. She played southern tailor trash a slave to her carnal desires. Kidman is a beautiful, sexy woman, but she isn't from Louisiana and she was out of place as low-born trollop.

The script didn't give these great actors room to express themselves. It was too confining. Not enough happened and we weren't on board with the story because the writer didn't disclose enough essential information to make us care. Foreboding was foreshadowed. It was clear this was not going to go well, but the references to future problems were never fleshed out. Taken from a real story about an inmate who escapes punishment as a result of a newspaper story. The writer must have known very little about how the criminal justice system works and about the relationship between the press and the law. A single story slips into the newspaper and the prisoner is released a few minutes later. It never works that way. It isn't that easy.

Too bad. Great actors with a bad script.