softsofa

It's a movie about a stunt man with a girlfriend. What do you expect in such a movie? A whole lot of stunt man and stunts. What does it deliver? A stunt man, some stunts and a whole lot of girlfriend. But it's worse than just that.

The girlfriend is a minor character. Her dialogue is mostly dull and uninteresting. Her problems are tedious and boring. However, if she was limited to a few minutes of screen time, it wouldn't be a problem. Minor characters and their issues add flavor to a movie.

Placing a minor character into the foreground and giving her lots of marginal dialogue to fill in all that extra time is a recipe for sleep.

If the girlfriend's scenes were cut to a total of a few minutes, the film would be 1/2 hour shorter and nothing would be lost.

I like having some mystery in a mystery. A major reveal in the first minutes bodes ill of what is to follow.

If I had any doubt, which I didn't, the 1/2 minute starting at the 45 minute mark confirmed what was shown in the first minutes of the series.

Finally, a minor event occurred in episode one. It would be of no consequence except that the main character's future action had already been revealed. That event would have immediately alerted him to the probable end result of what he planned to do. I looked up the plot in Wikipedia. That was the ending.

I did start the second episode. However, what the main characters did was too stupid to be credible, so I stopped watching. Here's why:

One is a house guest with a plan to make plenty of money. He meets some guy who has a shady deal that would add a little more money. Why risk a big score for a few extra pennies?

Due to the shady guy's connections, he would have known that the house guest's rich buddy would never fall for his low rent plan. So why did offer it?

The rich guy, after seeing who was brought to his house and how stupid the plan was, would have tossed the guest and his new friend right out. End of story.

Series ends with an unbelievable sequence of events that sews up the stories of each of the baddies. The likelihood of all those events occurring together is as likely as a meteoroid striking your noggin as you're turning in your winning lottery jackpot ticket .

Ridiculous final episodes ruin most series. However, Ritchie has lots of rabbits in his hat. Here, he squeezes one of those earful furball squeakers until sweet, sweet nectar oozes out. This is why I always give anything with his name on it a look. I'm seldom disappointed.

So, while this episode is a letdown, it doesn't reduce the overall entertainment value of the series.