1.5 Razors

Blindspot – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Blindspot – Pilot
  • wiki: link

Blindspot - Pilot

Created by Martin Gero, Blindspot opens with a strong visual that sets up an extremely shaky premise for an ongoing series as an naked amnesiac whose body is covered in tattoos is discovered in the middle of Times Square. Clues from Jane Doe‘s (Jaimie Alexander) tattoos lead to the involvement of Agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) on her case and prevent a terrorist attack in a (rather cheap) stage set of the Statue of Liberty. Just who Jane is, what her connection to Kurt is, and why his name appears so prominently on her largest tattoo are but three unanswered questions the show will no doubt continue to tease audiences with over the course of the season.

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The Scorch Trials

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
  • IMDb: link

Maze Runner: The Scorch TrialsThe sequel to The Maze Runner swaps out a complicated maze for an equally ill-defined desert landscape full of zombies for our surviving heroes to navigate. During a brief rest in a military complex obviously run by the same organization which experimented on them in the maze, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his friends meet a group of kids from other mazes and begin to uncover the truth about why they are so important to WICKED.

While the others are content to be kept prisoner in a safe place with three square meals a day and their own cot, Thomas befriends a boy from another group (Jacob Lofland), and, after discovering the truth about the continued experimentation, helps his friends escape into the barren wastleand outside the facility known as “the Scorch.”

In the same way that The Maze Runner declined to explain how putting kids in a death maze helped make them more valuable to WICKED, screenwriter T.S. Nowlin glosses over how a zombie virus is responsible for turning a major American city into the middle of the Sahara desert.

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Beauty and the Beast – Destined

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Beauty and the Beast – Destined
  • wiki: link

Beauty and the Beast - Destined

Beauty and the Beast closes out its Third Season with the conclusion of the Liam (Jason “Iron Eagle” Gedrick) storyline. With their adversary continuing to put pressure on each member of the group by manipulating the government to take a closer look at the unsolved murders which Vincent (Jay Ryan) played a major role (by, you know, killing them all), Vincent chooses to come clean about everything to the FBI in a last ditch effort to save his friends and take down Liam. And if in doing so he admits to, and gets away with, multiple murders to keep the show going another season that’s just a bonus (wait, so the government knows he’s a murdering super-human with anger issues and doesn’t have a problem with this?).

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Stitchers – Full Stop

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Stitchers – Full Stop
  • wiki: link

Stitchers - Full Stop

Stitchers‘ largely disappointing First Season comes to close with a shooting involving Cameron (Kyle Harris) and Fisher (Damon Dayoub) that will leave the police officer in the ICU and lead the scientist to risk his own life to discover the identity of the shooter. Breaking all the rules of the show by allowing Cameron to temporarily stop his own heart and allow Kirsten (Emma Ishta) to immediately stitch into him to see the shooting (remember how every stitch to this point has taken hours of set-up time?), “Full Stop” confirms the truth about Kirsten’s condition (shown to audiences weeks before) and takes coincidence well past believable levels by linking Kirsten and Cameron all the way back to childhood.

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Still Craptastic

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fantastic Four (2015)
  • IMDb: link

Fantastic FourThe first pre-screening I ever attended as a critic was 2005’s Fantastic Four. It was, in retrospect, a brutal rite of passage. One would hope that after a decade full of comic book films (the good, the bad, and everything in-between) 20th Century Fox would have learned their lesson and seen fit not to unleash such a travesty onto an unsuspecting movie-going audience yet again. One would be wrong.

Fantastic? After three movies somebody really needs to sue Fox for false advertising. The series made substantial improvements with 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer but still could only squeeze mediocrity out of one the best stories Marvel Comics has ever published.

Choosing to wipe the slate clean by adapting the Ultimate Marvel versions of the characters (an alternate timeline of the Marvel Universe I had little interest in going into this screening and even less on exiting), screenwriters Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater, and Josh Trank weave a tale of boy geniuses, alternate dimensions, and maniacal villains who are evil solely because the plot is dependent on them to be.

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