by Marcuse » Tue Jan 17, 2017 12:01 am
I've been watching the BBC remake of the Swedish tv show Wallander. It's terrible. As in; so terrible that it comes right back round to being hilariously funny for all the wrong reasons.
The titular character, Kurt Wallander, is absolutely the World's Most Hangdog Man. A human being for whom his personal theme song would be the sad trombone on a loop. The filming supports this in the most absurd way. At one point, having been signed up to an internet dating site by his daughter (because heaven forbid he ever does anything to alleviate the black vortex of personal despair we're supposed to infer from his placid, often distant expression) he gets a hit and arranges a meeting for 8:15. By 8:10 he's still at work, and doesn't leave until 8:45. When he rocks up to the club at 9:00, he's met by his date walking out and when he gestures feebly in her direction and makes what the actor thinks is a pleading expression, she curtly tells him no. Twenty minutes might have been overlooked, but 45? Never.
The scene ends with a lingering shot of the WMHM looking blankly into the middle distance in a room filled with people partying. My brain plays the sad trombone so many times, then the power cuts out leaving him in the dark as well. By this point I was surprised that a bird hadn't managed to fly in there to shit on his forehead as well. But the whole thing is like this. He's always being shouted at, struck, laughed at, cuckolded, and treated like a completely incompetent and stupid oaf who completely deserves what he gets because he's just that useless.
The camera work is also ridiculous, featuring so many extreme closeups of our trombone inspiring protag that they often forget that we might want to see things like...his chin, or his hair. Nope, only closeups of his eyes and snorting nostrils will do. Especially when he's doing something incomprehensibly stupid for no reason. Which happens a lot for a show about a detective.
Yeah, I'm going to go there. The writing for this show simply isn't there. They focused so hard on making the mystery mysterious that they often forget little things like logic or sense. Wallander, at one point, engages his foe alone and comes off badly. They then make a lot of mention and show that he's going back into the fray with backup. He then promptly leaves the backup behind to deal with the situation alone, rendering the scenes where they make that apparent utterly useless.
In addition, the characters enter and leave the show as required for the story and simply do not feature unless they're directly relevant to the plot. This happens with regulars such as Wallander's partner (played by Tom Hiddleston, who will forever be Loki) and characters only added for that plotline. They walk into the story, perform their function and then walk out and cease to exist. It makes every character seem like a cardboard cutout, and not a living breathing person and kills the immersion. They're also very bad to tying up what happens to characters. At one point Wallander enlists a teenage hacker he'd previously arrested to work on his case, because the bumbling oaf can't use computers at all (in a hilarious concession to the English speaking audience, they have him literally speak everything he's writing on the computer because he's writing it in Swedish in an attempt at verisimilitude). But when the teenager is traced by the baddies (and thus far everyone who has run afoul of them has died quickly and gruesomely) he's merely left in his house by Wallander, with only the precaution of a couple of words of warning to his farmer parent, and...shutting the kid's bedroom door. We literally never see him again, and don't even find out if he's alive or dead. One character who betrays him then performs a heel face turn in the same scene we start seeing her in the heel role.
Every scene feels like someone dreamed it up in isolation and then threw them together with no regard for the cohesive whole, and often using scenes purely for appearance without any theming or framing that makes it fit together with the rest of the episode. The whole thing is a mess, and I can only stand it by throwing out gales of laughter every time I see another silly situation or sad trombone moment.