hollywoodundeuce Reviews

The Patient (2022)

A boring ride that ended not with a bang, but a whimper

[3/10 · 21 December 2022]

After watching the trailer I was excited for this show. It felt like it was going to be a gripping thriller exploring the human psyche. What it actually ended up being was repetitive nonsense that was self indulgent in not only it's idea, but especially it's execution.

The last few episodes of the show tried to show that Alan was wrong and Ezra was a victim of his bad parenting but oh man, Ezra was the absolute worst. His "realisation" about his parenting fell incredibly flat for me.

The acting is frequently complimented in these reviews but it was just fine. As good as permanently stilted can be I suppose.

I REALLY wanted to like this show but I was annoyed damn near every minute of it.

I will say; I did enjoy David Alan Grier as Alan's "therapist" and those scenes showing his mechanism of retreating into himself were rare bright sparks for me.

The Fittest (2020)

A solid documentary for a questionable competition year

[8/10 · 30 August 2022]

It was filmed and organised well by guys who clearly cared about the sport and showing it in the best light they can. That is the positive side of it. The negative side is what happened with the tournament in 2019. Podium competitors getting cut for 1 bad event was insane.

This year really did mark a change for the competition, not a great one in my opinion. Yeah it created a change in the top performers but lowered the standard for the top (with the exception of Mat and Tia). Can you do 1 thing well? Great, you're now above an athlete who would beat you in 95% of events.

The way the competition was originally ran, with no eliminations, made way more sense. You do bad on the first event? Rough, but you might win the next 7 which makes it irrelevant from a scoreboard standpoint. You've proven that overall you're fitter than the other competitors even though you have a weak-spot but with this, it wasn't the case. People who were barely average across the board stayed in and finished with way less points than dominant competitors would've just because one event tripped them up.

We're no longer seeing the fittest, we're seeing the most consistently fine at best. It's great to give more people a chance, but it's a bare shell of former years.

That being said I'll return to my first point and say none of these issues make this a bad doc. It's genuinely one of the more solid sports documentaries you can watch and keeps to the consistency that cannon and sawyer have shown with their coverage of crossfit.

A League of Their Own Road Trip: Loch Ness to London (2021– )

Way too scripted

[3/10 · 14 August 2022]

It had it's moments but every moment was so overly scripted that it dragged the whole thing down. The show has people talking and actually reacting to what's happening, there's no reason the road trips can't do the same.

Intergalactic (2021)

Could be okay with some changes

[5/10 · 7 June 2022]

If they got rid of Tula so there could actually be character development between the group without her immediately putting a stop to that and keeping them antagonistic to each other and they stopped writing Ash so inconsistently the show could actually be alright. There's promise there they're just ruining it with questionable writing and some truly awful decisions (one of which so far is Tula's entire character). The fact they made all the criminals so hot topic edgy at the start really didn't help but as the season goes on they dial that down somewhat

Can be a bit heavy handed sometimes (the lab scene with Michael Smiley's character springs to mind. Where just in case you weren't getting the rape metaphor they have Tula explain it instead of trusting the audience to understand the most obvious metaphor I've seen in TV)

All in it has some positives. Space Pirate is very likeable, and Tula's daughter in any scene away from her mum with the guard is great, they're adorable little nerds. For each positive though they're shooting themselves in the foot somewhat with 2 more negatives.

Pretty Smart (2021)

1 dimensional caricatures

[2/10 · 10 October 2021]

It's 2021 and people are still writing shows where every single character is as far removed from a 3 dimensional human being as they can be? We have a ditzy blonde, a spiritualist hippie chick, a dumb pretty boy, a self obsessed gay guy and the pretentious bookish main character. That is all that can be said about each character because there isn't any more to them than that. If you want to watch unbearable and over the top stereotypes doing and saying nothing funny then this is the comedy sitcom for you.