WOW, Monsieur Spade utterly falls apart in the final act. Spoilers, although I doubt anyone's ever going to watch it.
Posted by
Mop🧹 (aka rburriel)
Jun 22 '24, 21:48
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They literally need Alfre Woodard to show up in the last 5 minutes of the final episode to explain everything. I mean, she's not a character in the series until the climax when she shows up with two guys carrying big guns, and then rounds up all the characters to lay out the entire plot, Agatha Christie style. It's like absurdist whodunnit cinema. A remake of Clue wouldn't be this lazy.
All that being said, I enjoyed a lot of this series. Clive Owen is great as Sam Spade. He delivers a great American accent and his French is passably (and intentionally) bad. This series is not for people who don't want to read subtitles. Even if you understand the French (and it's clear there's different regional dialects... the folks from Paris I could understand clearly... the country bumpkins, not so much), there's also plenty of Arabic. The dialogue is hilariously snappy, as you would expect from a Sam Spade mystery, but no one really talks like that. Eventually, though, you find too many twists, too many turns, and too many characters (yes, there's even at least one identical twin!) There's flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks. And Dean Winters shows up as a priest from New York. In the end, how could you possibly make sense of it all without Alfre Woodard? It was the only logical conclusion.
Although, gotta say, the sexualizing of a 15-year-old gets cringey from the very first. It's not subtle, and makes every scene with the girl uncomfortable.
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