Reviews

What happened to "Criminal Minds" in Season 6? The script writing goes from bad to worse to absolutely ridiculous. The "25 to Life" episode firmly belongs to the latter category. Morgan conducts a risk assessment of a convicted murderer, Don Sanderson, who is up for parole after 25 years in prison. Morgan recommends his release. Almost immediately after being released Sanderson kills another man who Sanderson claims was involved in the murder of his family 25 years ago. The BAU team right away sets out to vindicate Morgan's judgement and clear Sanderson, without giving any consideration to the possibility that Morgan was wrong. After a female accomplice in the original murders of Sanderson's family gets killed by a supposed mastermind of that attack, the BAU team constructs a profile of the killer. The profile is extremely generic (a psychopathic businessman), but by some sort of a cockamamie reasoning the BAU comes up with a suspect: an up and coming politician James Stanworth. Without producing a shred of any connection between Stanworth and the victims, Morgan demands that Strauss authorize the arrest of Stanworth. "He fits the profile!" "He fired 6,000 workers!" Really? Have they ever heard of such a thing as probable cause? Apparently not. When Strauss declines, Rossi accuses her of playing politics. Good grief! Disregarding Strauss' order, the BAU team goes to Stanworth's fundraiser where Morgan publicly confronts Stanworth and accuses him of the murders. Again, Morgan doesn't produce any evidence of any kind and just hurls a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations at Stanworth. Of course, Stanworth crumbles and shouts: "I don't lose control!", which is supposed to reveal his true murderous nature to everybody, and Morgan righteously arrests him. A completely cringeworthy scene, at the MST 3000 level. No judge would agree to hold the suspect on this kind of "evidence", and the case would never proceed to trial. Any police officer or an FBI agent acting the way Morgan does here would be fired on the spot.

Weak and inconsistent writing ruined this episode. First, as some other reviewers have noted, the episode unduly emphasizes and sympathizes with three young killers and rapists. Second, the BAU's investigation of this case strikes me as rather inept and at times downright stupid and incompetent. After the first of the three unsubs (the "weak link" guy) is found murdered, he is quickly identified. But after that the great minds of the BAU fail to pursue the most basic Police Work 101 line of inquiry: They make no effort to interview the other students on campus, such as his classmates and dorm mates, and his family, to try to find out who his close friends might be and who he hung out with. Instead the BAU continues to rely on various computer database searches only. I hope that the real FBI is more competent than that. Then, to top it off, at the end of the episode, after having earlier accused the sheriff (probably correctly) of beating and abusing his son, who is revealed to be one of the killers, Hochner suddenly goes all empathetic and gives the sheriff friendly advice on how to reconnect with his son and "be there for him". WTF was that?!

GOT should have been the greatest television series ever made. And until the end of season 6 it was. The show had everything: superb writing, outstanding production values, epic scale, gritty and complex characters, likable villains and unlikable heroes, blood and guts, plenty of suspense and let's not forget some pretty frank treatment of sex too. The show was very modern (e.g. Most of its surviving leading characters were women), without being preachy or shrill about it. One of the GOT's most appealing aspects has always been that it's hard to distinguish heroes from villains here, and the show tries hard tp prevent the viewers from classifying the characters in those terms. (Of course, there are exceptions, like Joffrey.) While over time the audience gets more and more emotionally invested in the characters of Daeneris and Jon, and to somewhat lesser extent Arya and Sansa, they are also portrayed as rather flawed, complex and contradictory figures, that chase and grow over time. For me the high point of the show was episode 10 of season 6, with the aftermath of Cersei's trial. If the show had ended then, I would have gave it 10/10. The 7-th season was still watchable and entertaining but the quality of writing clearly went down. While the pace of the action picked up, somehow it also felt more perfunctory and it became harder to care. Nothing like the episode "The Door" in this season. And the of course comes season 8. As many other reviewers noted, a complete and utter disaster. The writing completely collapsed, cartoonishly so, and the storyline became nonsensical and full of holes. A good final episode might have still saved the season and the series but instead we were handed a cruel and disgusting joke. For much of the duration of the series the show's creators prided themselves on unexpected plot twists and staying ahead of the audience, keeping it guessing. But that cannot be the point of the grand finale of the magnum epic like GOT. Here you have to deliver the expected. The most predictable and the most satisfying moment in the final episode was the "Clegane bowl". And I have not heard anyone complain about it. But you cannot build up the audience's emotional investment in the fate of the main character over the period of 8 years and then suddenly turn her form a queen-to-be into a raving mass murderer and kill her off. And on top of that discard the second most important character in the series as an unimportant afterthought. That's a complete betrayal of the loyalties of the audience of the series and it made it impossible to rewatch the show for most people. A great pity, really, since many of the early episodes are true masterpieces. But the vanity and the stupidity of the writers in the finale killed the entire series.

Oh. My. God. This movie is so awful that making someone watch it from start to end should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. We are not just talking an average B-film kind of bad, we are talking Mystery Science Theatre 3000 level of badness. I enjoy some Christian themed movies but this one is an insult to any serious person of faith. Some other reviewers are complaining about poor acting. While they are correct, the thing that really ruins this film is absolutely God-awful writing. Almost every line of the script (and every single line coming from the lips of the titular character) is filled with abhorrent sanctimonious pseudo-religious platitudes and nonsense. Everything that Gabriel says sounds like a grotesque idiotic caricature of genuine faith impossible to take seriously if you are over 5 years old. It does not help that the kid playing Gabriel displays all the acting skills of a wooden post. One just has to pray that he got better with age, assuming he is still in the movie business. The picture of Christian faith that the film portrays is so shallow, so impossibly sanctimonious and full of cliches and platitudes that the film would drive most viewers away from Christianity. If keeping the faith would have been as easy as having a winged boy-angel visit your town, end the multi-year draught, restore the sight of a blind girl and bring another girl who does from a drug overdose back to life, we would all be more Catholic than the Pope by now. Speaking of Catholics, I wonder where in Texas the film's writers think they can find a town where almost everybody is white, there are no hispanics and no Catholics, and everybody goes to the same protestant church. I guess all the latino, Chinese and Indian residents of the town have already been deported. When, during the climactic scene of Gabriel spending his fluffy angel-wings in the church, the service attendees almost start speaking in tongues, I almost puked. All in all, the film is more painfully atrocious than a biblical plague.

Not a lot of sci in this sci-fi movie. Some of the visual effects are pretty good, but everything else sucks and stinks like a dead fish. The acting by the two leads is the worst aspect of the film. Will Smith delivers a supremely wooden and emotionally dead performance. Jaden Smith just can't act, period. He should go and do something else, something that he is actually good at. Papa Smith should be man enough to tell that to Jr instead of embarrassing the kid in front of millions of viewers. The script and the plot are terrible as well. Apart from being boring and unimaginative, the basic premise of the story is nonsensical, even by the lax standards of the genre. 1000 years have passed on Earth since humans have left. And yet, papa Smith, without batting an eye, says to his kid: "Everything on this planet has evolved to kill humans." Excuse me?! Why would animals on Earth be evolving to kill humans when there are no humans around? Evolution simply doesn't work this way. Nor this quickly. Bringing an Ursa on Earth for the grand finale also does not make sense (why bother with a dangerous planet holding two lonely humans) and just screams "An artificial plot device!" Overall, perhaps not as bad as "Battlefield Earth" but damn close.