At the urging of a friend, I recently plowed through all twelve episodes of the first season of the Fox action/adventure series Human Target (2010) on DVD. He thought I’d like it, and he was right. Loosely based off of a DC comic book character, it’s a story about a trio of badasses (a reformed assassin, a former cop, and a torture-happy, jack-of-many-trades mercenary) now running a company set on protecting innocent clients against the evildoers looking to harm them. The plots were peppered with hefty amounts of first-rate stuntwork, exciting gunplay, MacGyver-like ingenuity, and some memorably feminine (in all the best ways) supporting players.

The music by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) evoked a cinematic air in the James Bond/Indiana Jones mold, but with an underlying somberness that lent a pleasing heft to the proceedings:

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Actors Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earle Haley all shine in their roles for various reasons — especially Haley, whose delicious politically incorrect performance as Guerrero is the most consistently entertaining tough guy I’ve seen on TV since Michael K. Williams’ Robin Hood-of-the-ghetto Omar in HBO’s The Wire (a show that ended up ruined by its nihilistic writers, but that’s a topic for another post).

But later, settling in to begin watching Season 2 of Human Target on my computer, I wondered if Fox could bring a fledgling action/adventure series into its sophomore year without their usual pattern of first screwing it up and then unceremoniously canceling it. The sad spectacle of Big Hollywood regular Adam Baldwin’s Firefly getting canned before it even had a chance to get started was the most lamentable flameout of many at that often hapless network. Sure, they gave us The X-Files, but that was a looooong time ago. They also gave us 24, but I go against the usual conservative meme by thinking the show terrible. Human Target, on the other hand, held a lot of promise — but would they be able to capitalize on it? (more…)

It’s the end of the world – and I feel haunted

Imagine that the entire world as you’ve known it has come to an end right before your eyes. Almost everyone has died, or gone crazy scavenging for food, even becoming cannibals in the name of survival. Your beautiful wife, who was the light of your life, left you to wander off in the night and die rather than endure another terrifying day of huddling from the elements and hiding from the human monsters that most everyone else has become. 

And now all that’s left is you – and the ten-year-old son whose care has become your entire purpose of your existence. You had a good life once – until just a decade before – with a dignified career, nights at the opera, and joy emanating from every pore of your beautiful spouse. But now it’s all a memory, and a fading one at that. You haven’t been called by your own name in so long that you and your son are only known as Man and Boy. 

What then, the universe asks? Do you keep a faith in God, or curse the hopelessness around you? Do you try to maintain the fire of a good soul and pass moral values to your son, or do you let your morals and humanity eventually slip away? If your morals slip away in the middle of nowhere, does anyone notice? 

Those are the questions that lie at the root of director John Hillcoat’s profoundly moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Road.” Starring Viggo Mortensen in an alternately feral and saintly performance of shattering emotional depth – his are the most haunted eyes I’ve ever seen sustained in a film performance – it is a film that doesn’t shy from some of the most disturbing questions of human existence, yet also guides viewers gently through to a sense of grace and hope that will move, for even days afterward, those brave enough to take the journey.  (more…)