24: Redemption
Weirdly, not on streaming, so I had to watch my DVD copy.
24 is in an odd position to do a movie, as the problem Jack has to deal with needs to be small enough to be taken care of in two hours, but still feel like it deserves a movie. So, we get Jack trying to save a bunch of kids in Africa from being taken to serve as child soldiers.
One of the problems with the movie is that it relies on the acting talents of lots of children who are clearly unexperienced. Most of them are just required to act scared, but anytime one of them needs to show affection towards Jack it feels forced on both sides.
I’d always remembered Robert Carlyle as the villain of the movie, as he’s their big name guest star, but he’s just the friend who heroically sacrifices himself, and isn’t very interesting.
I’d forgotten how much of the movie was setting up the next season, with Jon Voight, Cherry Jones, Colm Feore, and co. It feels out of place, and definitely hurts the pacing. It leaves the movie feeling like an extended prologue to the next season rather than its own thing, and watching the season immediately after the movie confirms that.
24: Season 7
Another reset season, completely getting rid of the LA setting and CTU. It’s definitely better than the previous season, but at this point the show can’t help feeling like a parody of itself at times. All of the super-defensive “no, it’s good and necessary that Jack tortures people” stuff (and there’s a lot of it) is grating.
The midseason reveal of Jon Voight as a key player would work better if Redemption hadn’t already set him up, making me wonder for the first twelve hours when he was going show up. Once he does arrive though, he’s in fine scene-chewing form.
Bringing Tony back was a decent idea, but he’s barely in a lot of the season. I guess they didn’t know what to with him and were stalling until the eventual “no, psych, he really is a bad guy (maybe)” twist. The final episode where the one guy responsible for all of the terror attacks of the past three seasons inexplicably shows up in person so that Tony can try to take his revenge is very silly.
The new FBI characters are okay. The dynamic of “Jack suggests doing something illegal to get results, Renee reluctantly agrees, Larry gets angry at them” gets real old, real fast. Janeane Garofolo as a new Chloe is pretty obvious casting (Rajskub replaced Garofolo on Larry Sanders a decade earlier), but she doesn’t get much to do. The scenes in the final hours when they finally put them together are fun though.
Another part of the “playing the hits” aspect of the season is that, after mostly avoiding it for many seasons, we’re back to another “mole inside the agency” subplot, and it’s the most obvious person.
The one new character who doesn’t work at all is the president’s daughter, who becomes her new chief of staff halfway through the day, immediately orders a murder, and then tries very poorly to cover it up. It’s awful.
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