Now that Jeremy Renner is a big star – Hawkeye in the Avengers, replacement for Matt Damon in The Bourne What-have-you #4 (Bourne Legacy, 2012; and Universal is planning a sequel with a focus on Renner’s character, Aaron Cross. it is interesting to find a short-lived television series from Sony proliferating on multiple platforms on the web – Amazon, Hulu, Crackle and others. I watched Crackle, which is free – but has commercials – and enjoyed the 44 minute presentation
The show ran for ten episodes on ABC from April to June of 2009. Somehow it escaped me, but thanks to the need for intellectual property on the information superhighway that is the internet, you can find anything, even the brilliant Journey To The Unknown British TV show from Hammer Films (1968) that was a kind of Outer Limits meets Twilight Zone. Will have to get to an episode or two or three from that no-longer-lost classic soon.
Renner and Harold Perrineau (Matrix 2 and 3, Oz TV series) are the recognizable names. The script to this one, The Apology, a bit hokey, de rigueur relationship situations (the most annoying thing about Law & Order: SVU, where all the characters somehow have traumas that make the cops victims sometimes more than the real victims; in The Unusuals it’s bland human interest patter cloying to the point of exasperation. But the filming is absolutely marvelous, sweeping and unique camera angles that make the television episode almost seem as big as The Dark Knight in Imax (well, maybe not THAT big, but you get the point), moviemaking that adds a touch of class to this intriguing cop drama that went sideways. Viewing the second to last episode one can see the possibilities, and had the producers (and cast) tweaked it just a little this way or that, it could have been a keeper.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com, Gatehouse Media, Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, and a variety of other media outlets. Joe also produces and hosts Visual Radio, a seventeen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed Jodie Foster, director/screenwriter David Koepp, Michael Moore, John Cena, comics/actors Margaret Cho, Gilbert Gottfried, Gallagher, musicians Mark Farner and Don Brewer of Grand Funk Railroad, Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals, political commentator Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
