The Reunion

Back and forwards all the time with irritating parts played by the young counterparts of the main characters and dramatic music score like in a B movie. I was immediately put off at the start by the terrible casting of Ioan's parents namely Rupert Graves and Dervla Kirwan. Considering Rupert is ten years older, Dervla a mere two years older than Ioan I initially thought oh they must be playing his brother and sister in law but no. They even gave Dervla a grey rinse to make her seem more authentic. They should have cast actors in their late 60s or 70s not two actors who are in their fifties. So the whole thing is ridiculous from that point as well as the daft plot. The only thing going for it is the scenery.

This really is pure pap despite the very good cast and the absolute beautiful location. The plot is so convoluted and contrived that half-way through the viewer basically gives up caring who killed who and why and replaces it with will I survive for six episodes. I did but I have no idea why other than to upset the wife who wanted to switch it off after two. As for Ioan Gruffudd, who plays the lead,, he basically plays exactly the same annoying character that he does in the Australian drama Harrow where he spends most of the time as a voice-over describing the plot twists to the dozing audience. Do yourself a favour and give this a miss!

Scenery and actors should have been a formula for success, unfortunately it didn't gel. From the disjointed beginning this looked like an bad mix--maybe they changed the script and directors every 20 minutes as a "new wave" in episodic drama. It felt like an editor came in with scissors and clipped all the good parts out.

The jumpy narrative only became more complicated as the story unfolded. I wish they'd have had a narrator dubbed in order to make sense of the action.

If you choose to waste your time here, try turning off the sound and guess the timeline of the action--it will be the only way you can justify your hours.

This could have been so much better! The first big mistake was to have Rupert Graves play Ioan Gruffudd dad especially as there is only 10 years between them both. Rupert is a great actor but you cannot make the father/son gap work without some serious makeup to make the gap would better. The other this is that as someone with dyslexia there are far too many subtitles and the speed is a bit fast so you cannot keep up with what is going on. Also the third point is that the stories didn't also seem to flow smoothly so you felt you bounce a long and jumps with some weird story plots that don't seem to fit or feel relieved to the over all story.

This looked promising, the cast are fantastic actors, the location is simply stunning and premise decent. After a couple of episodes, the whole thing starts to creek, the storyline becomes confused and strange. Then, episode by episode it gets worse until it's almost farcicle. Essentially it was an awful script, strange storyline and frankly unbelievable characters. Some of the storyline is just strange - not in a Donny Darko 'really makes you think' way, more of a 'what the heck was that about, humans don' t behave like that' way. What a waste of such excellent acting talent, who do their best to prop this up, but fail under the weight of such a poor story.