Reviews

Reading all of the positive reviews, both critic and user, I'm left wondering if I saw a totally different film to everyone else.

I'm a huge fan of the single-location movie - from "Panic Room" to "Phone Booth" to myriad others, I find it usually sparks the director's creativity, resulting more often than not in a cat-and-mouse thriller with more twists and turns than a Frank Gehry building.

"Free Fire" has no twists. No turns either. It doesn't even seem to have distinct scenes - rather, it's just one, long, meandering slew of cordite and crap one liners. Somehow the filmmakers have managed to take 70s kitsch, guns and beautiful Brie Larson, and made something less appealing than Zika.

Surely what we want from a film like this, is a slick, ingenious plot, and a cast of interesting characters, with at least one we can root for. "Free Fire" offers none of these things - every character is vile and one dimensional, we don't care about anyone, and as the body count rises, my only reaction was one of relief at knowing I was one death closer to the credits.

I'm a huge sucker for survival shows, especially the "marooned on a desert island" subgenre. While Bear Grylls' "The Island" and Channel 4's "Eden" explored the dynamics of a group striving to build a community with limited tools, "Naked and Marooned" pushes the concept to its extreme by stranding ex-British army officer and adventurer Ed Stafford on a deserted Fijian island for 60 days, with nothing but a camera and an emergency med kit and satellite phone. That's right, no clothes, no knife, not even any water.

While help is obviously nearby in the event of accident or illness, one quickly realises how the total isolation represents an equally daunting challenge. Humans are social creatures, and the sheer loneliness, compounded by sweltering heat, dehydration and hunger, simply maintaining a level head and avoiding anxiety and paranoia is no mean feat.

The show proceeds as you might expect, with Stafford striving each day to find and consume just enough water and food to survive, while relying on ingenuity, luck and painstaking hard work to improve his standard of living from caveman to hunter gatherer. And while this arduous process is fascinating to watch, despite the little footage Stafford is able to capture, a couple of red flags do start to pop up that call into question the show's authenticity.

For one, the fact that there just happens to be a small flock of goats on this minuscule rock in the pacific ocean is questionable at best. Likewise that there are these pristinely planted tuber plants. While I understand it would be unreasonable and dangerous to maroon Stafford on an island without enough food to survive, the lack of transparency on this issue irks me. "The Island with Bear Grylls" was honest about ensuring food sources on the island, and I resent the producers of this show not doing the same. Finally, the fact that Stafford is unable to catch a goat himself, but then one magically gets trapped in some brambles just metres from his camp, again seems dubious.

These questions aside, the show succeeds in its main goal: demonstrating just how difficult real survival is when you're alone with no tools. It certainly made me question my own survival ability seeing this highly experienced, physical adonis spend days hacking away at a slender tree with a clam shell in order to build his shelter. From a purely entertaining standpoint, however, I certainly missed the group tensions and conversations of other shows.

Looking at all of the stellar reviews for this AMC remake of the original Scandinavian noir from 2007, I can only conclude that most viewers don't care about character consistency or even internal logic. I'm not going to delve too much into the plot, which you can get from countless other reviews and synopses - instead, let me try and explain why this could have been a great show, but ultimately frustrates.

So it's a police drama that centres around Seattle PD detective Linden (Mireille Enos) and her new partner Holder (Joel Kinnaman, the absolute highlight of the show and one to watch for the future). Seasons 1 & 2 follow the arc of a murder mystery of a young girl which is finally solved in the season 2 finale, and closely mirrors the plot of the original show. Season 3 gives us a new murder case, this time of a serial killer, and I have no idea about season 4 because the final twist and resolution of season 3 is so absurdly nonsensical, I immediately vowed to forget all about this stupid show as soon as I shared my frustrations in this review.

What made the original so great, along with the sinister tone and appropriately eerie yet beautiful cinematography, was two things: 1) the roller-coaster ride of twists and turns that ultimately resulted in the killer's identity being revealed as someone who had been under our noses the whole time, and despite being impossible to predict, made perfect sense. And 2) the confluence of police mystery, political thriller and family drama all intersecting to show us the underbelly of a whole city, and how everything is connected - not too dissimilarly to "The Wire". And while this US version of The Killing certainly faithfully captures the mood, suspense and intrigue of the original, it utterly fails in the two key areas that I mentioned.

As in the original, the audience gets led on a wild goose chase of shifting suspicions and surprising twists, but this time - perhaps because the show-runners feared its audience may have seen the original - it decided to construct a vastly different and more complex conclusion to the original murder case (seasons 1 & 2). That could have been a great decision. Indeed, I was excited when I realised that I had been misled to believe the original show's counterpart was not the killer here. However, while the conspiratorial reason for the victim's murder makes sense, the identity of the killer doesn't. On the one hand he/she is supposed to be a normal, non-psychopathic person whose action is totally out of character, and yet they behave throughout the show like nothing is bothering them at all. Are we really supposed to believed that a regular person who does something terrible like murder will just be able to continue with their day to day life totally unfazed by the most traumatic of experiences? It annoyed the hell out of me, but I was curious to see what season 3 would bring, with no blueprint (the original only had the one season).

Alas, the ending to season 3 is infinitely more egregious. This time, the fact that the killer was functioning normally throughout the show makes more sense. It's clearly a psychopath, and although it's still a stretch to imagine such a high functioning psychopath who can be a loving family man and consummate professional by day and butcher dozens of children by night, I'm willing to suspend disbelief given it's a TV show. (Let it be noted though that the show strives for a very realistic, even mundane, depiction of the real world.)

Where the wheels fall off is in the season finale where our hero Linden finally confronts the killer and (SPOILER!) executes him/her. Now, we've gotten to know Linden extremely well over the past 36 episodes. The writers have, to their credit, created a complex, well rounded character. Which is why it's painfully ludicrous that she would do something like this which is so out of character it would be like Walter White from Breaking Bad suddenly turning himself in to the police, or Cersei in Game of Thrones admitting defeat and retiring to the countryside.

There are myriad other minor annoyances that smack of lazy writing and/or poor research - like why are the characters using flip phones and physical maps in 2013? And since when do meth dealers spend their days skateboarding? Not to mention why do all the meth users have perfect teeth? (Breaking Bad is seriously guilty here too.)

So in conclusion: go watch the original instead. Don't be put off by it being in Danish. It's captivating and within just minutes you'll forget you're reading subtitles at all.