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mr-caljoe
Reviews
Dracula (2020)
Landed on its neck
The first episode is excellent. The second is OK. The third is god awful.
The boldness of the third and final episode is admirable and the ending is satisfactory, but the hour and a half it takes to get there is unacceptable.
Bringing Dracula into the modern day is a great way to get the audience to feel the incongruity in living as long as him. Its also an even better way to pacify the suspense and terror the series started with. Dracula now has Skype meetings with his lawyer and uses Tinder to find new victims. How trendy.
The switch in the tone of the humour is just as jarring. The first two episodes relied on witty dialogue and sinister misunderstandings, and rarely (if ever) actually warranted a laugh. The third is mostly a comedic commentary on how different 2020 is when compared to 1897. This also never made me laugh but its difficult not to notice how much harder it's trying. There's a brilliant comparison to be made to the film 'From Dusk Til Dawn'.
To speak of the content of the episode, it was absent of any. At the beginning dracula is captured, then he escapes, then he's captured, then he's released after his miranda rights were never read to him (or something equally stupid). The rest of the episode seems to meander aimlessly until we are given a sudden direction (about 10 minutes before the end) that somewhat gives motive to the last hour of Dracula's London vampire diaries.
In episode 1 we had a clear motive from the beginning: Jonathan needs to escape dracula. The humour is subtle and clever and the horror aspect of the original work is treated with respect and a fondness for. Episode 3 tries to do everything totally different, and I don't know why.
The English Game (2020)
Should've been a film. Not a series.
Contains 6 episodes of 45min each when it could easily have been a film of 2 hours or more.
There was a lot of filler which was very cliché. The best parts of the series are when class struggle is viewed through football but this takes a backseat at times so the writers can make their own episode of Downton Abby where two Etonians attempt to save the working class from themselves.
There wasn't nearly enough football, and when there was, it was poorly executed with jumpy camera work and purposeful confusuon.
All in all good film though - I mean series