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Reviews
The Bastard Executioner (2015)
This BASTARD Just Took Two Hours of My Life
I LOVE period pieces, Middle Ages, UK accents and some well-place bloodshed (long live GoT!). I watch ANYTHING Medieval, Renaissance and fantasy age. I've been anticipating this show and wanted to like it so bad, but 30 minutes in and I have so many emotions and none of them good. I'm turned-off, a little sad, a little angry and a lot BORED. I'll be kind of vague so I won't "spoil" too much for anyone who hasn't seen it.
In the first 5 minutes there's stabbing, slicing, spurting gore and blood, bodies everywhere, a gratuitous sex scene that appears to be there purely for "shock" value and an unnecessary "dump" scene (same conversation could have been had while he was eating his morning porridge or whatever). They held out for another 15 minutes before adding some full on body flaying in front of a kid.
They don't even attempt to try to develop any of the characters first, so that you might actually care, or not care, about this one or that, which I would get if this was a movie. It's a TV series guys AND a TWO-HOUR pilot. You have way more leeway to try to make us like, or hate, or even know these people before blowing your entire wad in the pilot.
Then there's the teeth. Wow. The teeth. OK, I get that people in the Middle Ages probably didn't have pearly whites and they're attempting some realism. But, It's. SO. Distracting. There's GOT to be something in between Angelina Jolie and the extreme Gollum teeth they decided to go with here.
Worst of all it's SOOOOO super predictable. I practically recited the lines before they said them (SPOILER ALERT - after the village raid I literally said "kill them all" out loud, before the baron (or whoever he was) did. I called most of the plot in the same manner, so there was really no point to wasting my time watching this. Further in, they tossed in another even more gratuitous sex scene (if you haven't watched this you're probably wondering how much "more" it could get, but it did and it was also predictable).
The ONLY light for me was the surprise of Katey Sagal (who got all of the 3 stars gave this). I think she's the best character here, so far. And I have to give her MAD props for her range! To play Peggy Bundy, Gemma Teller Morrow, this witch (with a decent accent!) and all her roles in between. Wow. She's an amazing actor and SHE is the only reason I will give this show a few more episodes to try to win me over.