Carpenter's Tools: Escape from L.A.

[Note: This is a stupefyingly belated entry in my John Carpenter retrospective, which I intended to go all the way through his canon but could find scant enthusiasm to continue past In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter's last triumph before a series of mediocre-to-awful films leading up to his present condition. But I am curious to see if I can find redeeming qualities in his late-period work, and finishing his whole filmography will make writing about The Ward that much easier when the time comes. So, at last, I resume my retrospective, some two unnecessary years in the making, with Escape from L.A.]

By 1996, prospects had so soured for John Carpenter that he was reduced to making the sequel to one of his finest features, Escape from New York. Naturally, after the gradual "Disney terraforming" of New York that started in the '90s, the Big Apple no longer held the same reputation it did at the start of the '80s when one suspected that Carpenter did not even need to build sets to film in the urban decay he portrayed. In the mid-90s, Los Angeles, home of uncontrollable gang crime and pollution, became the place to be for hellish futuristic cities. Demolition Man presented an L.A. consumed in flames before an ultra-liberal thought police took over and bleached the place, and Escape from L.A. presents a Los Angeles separated from the mainland by a massive earthquake, leading to a theocratic takeover that condemns L.A. Island to the mythic realm of Sodom and Gomorrah. Where neo-hippie pacifism babied up the city in Stallone's action vehicle, Carpenter's film is the last reflection of his disgust with modern conservatism and its incorporation of the religious right into its framework. Los Angeles, it seems, can never win.

Bubba Ho-tep

As we all know, there's a dearth of originality in the entertainment industry. For every Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mad Men on television, there are a dozen cop shows, eight of which belong to either the Law & Order or CSI franchises. If a movie turns even a modest profit, someone will try to make a sequel. In the age of reality TV and CGI, laziness has lowered the bar so considerably that a film like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen can make nearly 3/4 of $1 billion worldwide and the new Harry Potter is met with effusive praise simply for being noticeably less mediocre than the majority of the series.

Well, novelist Joe Lansdale and director Don Coscarelli threw down the gauntlet with this one. Bubba Ho-tep starts with that familiar what-if? scenario where in Elvis Presley didn't die. Then it takes a sharp left about 10 seconds in and never lets up. As it happens, the real Elvis is dying in a nursing home with a cancerous sore on his flaccid penis. Back in the '70s, he grew tired of the fame and the manipulation at the hands of his so-called friends and his manager, the notorious Colonel Parker, and switched places with the best Elvis impersonator around, Sebastian Haff. Haff is the one who died on the toilet, while a trailer explosion eradicated the documents proving Elvis' real identity.

Sounds crazy, huh? It only gets better. Also a resident of the nursing home is a man claiming to be John F. Kennedy. The only hitch: he's played by Ossie Davis, and ergo black. When Elvis respectfully points this out, "Jack" replies, "They dyed me this color, all over!" after the assassination attempt at Dealey Plaza. Davis gives his finest performance since the "Mayor" in Do the Right Thing; his sense of comic timing is impeccable, and he never lapses into mugging as he treats this role as seriously as any other.

The movie would have been completely bizarre if it had just stuck with these two interacting, and maybe it should have, but yet another twist is just on the horizon. For you see, a mummy is preying on the slow-moving, forgotten elders in this home, and it's up to Elvis and John F. Kennedy to stop it. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'. In all honesty, this storyline somewhat takes away from the hilarity of just watching Elvis and Kennedy interact, but Coscarelli films the sequences with such an over-the-top glee that they're just as rewarding in their own way.

As great as Davis is, and as insane as the mummy makes the proceedings, if you need one reason to see the film, it's this: Bruce Campbell. No one has ever looked so much like Elvis, and his drawling swagger makes for the most convincing King since Andy Kaufman. The film hinges on his voiceover narration, which Campbell delivers with a matter-of-fact resignation that is achingly hysterical, yet also hints at an undercurrent of sadness, as Elvis reflects on the nature of dying and society's disregard for the old. Campbell has long been undervalued as the supposed "King of B-movies," but he brings genuine pathos to the role, even if that pathos is in itself funny.

Bubba Ho-tep is bursting at the seams with ideas. Those ideas may be universally absurd, but that's what makes this such a fun ride. You can tell how deeply the makers cared for and loved the project in the DVD commentaries, one of which is uproariously delivered by Campbell in character and another in which Campbel and Coscarelli take just enough time out of laughing at the silliness of the film to offer genuine gratitude and admiration for those involved. A film like this does not ask to be taken seriously, but I see more creativity and joy of the craft than I do in the overwhelming majority of pictures that nab Best Picture nominations every year.

Evil Dead II

Following the underwhelming reception of Crimewave, collaborators Sam Raimi and the Coen brothers overhauled their plan to break into Hollywood. The Coens gathered some rising stars and played the farce of Crimewave with a straighter face and without the broad genre pastiches, resulting in the classic comedy Raising Arizona, which helped establish Nicolas Cage as a household name. Raimi, on the other hand, threw up his hands and ran back to the independent world (and the well) to see if a bigger version of the horror film that put him on the radar might allow him to truly get his foot in the door. So, he brought figures of the first film's Italian grosses to producer Dino De Laurentiis and received $3.5 million, tenfold the budget of the original, to make a sequel.

The result was nothing less than a schlocky masterpiece and the definitive horror-comedy film, if not horror cult movie in general. As if to prove that The Evil Dead wasn't a fluke or that Crimewave had broken his creative spark (which is on display in a few wonderful sequences), Evil Dead II took the sequel maxim of "double everything" and decided it would just be more fun to quadruple it. As he could not secure the rights to use clips from his debut in this film, Raimi decided to simply shoot new material as a recap. Aspects of the story changed (Ash travels to the cabin with only his girlfriend, while others show up later), but the gist of the entire first film is delivered in about seven minutes, which is a subtle indicator that not even The Evil Dead could fully prepare you for what was in store.

At the end of first film, Ash emerged from the cabin as daybreak destroyed the final remains of his possessed friends, only for the unseen evil to rush through the woods and catch him as the image faded to black. Most would assume this to be the end of the line but, as Bruce Campbell likes to phrase it, "positive box-office response saved Ash." The recap of the previous movie ends the moment the evil grabs Ash and we see what happens. He lives, yes, but now he too is possessed.

The first time around, Ash was no different from his compatriots: he was as weak, as dumb and as cheesy. Campbell takes a different approach to the character here, and it forever cements Ash as one of the greatest movie characters in history. In the recap, he is no longer an indecisive wretch but an ice-cold leader. Oh, he's still dumb as a stump, but you tend to listen to a man who doesn't give more than a moment's pause before taking a chainsaw to his demonic girlfriend because he knows that the woman he loved is dead. When his hand becomes possessed, he lops it off and eventually replaces it by hooking the chainsaw to his stump.

Campbell was clearly a rookie when he and Raimi started work on The Evil Dead just after they both graduated high school; his delivery, like the entire dialogue, was so indebted to the B-movies the friends grew up watching that it was simply too straight to convey the parody. No such problem exists here: Campbell can turn from scenery-chewing B-movie putz to ass-kicking action hero on a dime, and that's not even counting all the times he gets possessed in the film. He's as much responsible for the film's brilliance as Raimi and Scott Spiegel's script.

That script bursts at the seams with madcap genius just waiting for Raimi's direction to send it over the edge into cult timelessness. They didn't invent horror-comedy with this movie -- one could argue that the genre goes all the way back to Abbot and Costello's run-ins with movie monsters -- but never had a film so effortlessly mixed scares with laughs. Ash's possession offers up some chilling moments, but when the demon focuses in his hand and Ash must hunt down his own body part, it becomes transcendent farce. And that's not even the best bit involving rogue appendages: remember the eyeball?

And that's the tip of the gory iceberg. Even revisiting this trilogy, it's hard for me to process that The Evil Dead is downright tame compared to this. Going for scares made the filmmakers somewhat restrained (it should go without saying that this is relatively speaking), but now they just threw caution to the wind and went completely and utterly insane. And damned if it doesn't work. The scene were Ash's dead girlfriend rises from her grave and dances using her severed head like a pork pie hat is a creepily hysterical nod to Fred Astaire, while a possessed Ash crying over his lady's necklace might seem like an emotional moment but is just so (deliberately) absurd you'll be crying from the laughter, not the drama.

I want to write about this film all day but I'm afraid that I'll just end up listing every moment of the film, because not a single moment fails to elicit scares, laughs or awe at Raimi's low-budget prowess, and often they inspire all three. As I watched this for the second time, I couldn't help but wonder if Tim Burton ever sent Raimi a royalty check, as Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas openly steal elements and even creature models from Evil Dead II.

Though Campbell and Raimi only spent 6 years on other projects in between the first two Evil Dead movies (with Raimi only making Crimewave in the interim), Evil Dead II appears to be the work of studied pros. While its computer and stop-motion animation looks incredibly dated, the film as a whole hasn't aged a day because it straddles the line between serious filmmaking and mad self-awareness perfectly -- the pendulum swung the other way when the third, hopefully final, installment arrived and completed the journey from straight horror to outright farce, though that too is an excellent picture. As an example of a seamless blend of horror and comedy, only 2004's Shaun of the Dead comes close to the level of Raimi's magnum opus. When people tell me to just sit back and enjoy a thrill ride when I pan something like Transformers, I just think wistfully of Ash's hand giving him the finger before he basts it with his boomstick.

Crimewave

When Sam Raimi's no-budget horror debut The Evil Dead became an instant cult hit when it finally found a distributor, the studios naturally came calling. After all, if this guy could make such a splash with a $375,000 schlock movie, imagine what he could do with a real budget and wide distribution. So, Raimi received $3 million to make his proposed gangster comedy, Crimewave, a pastiche of Golden Age noir and Three Stooges gags. Enlisting the help of his old friends the Coen brothers, who were themselves fresh off their acclaimed debut Blood Simple, Raimi seemed poised to bring the indie ethos to Hollywood and possibly even change the system.

Then the filmmakers learned a hard lesson about studio involvement. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead co-producer Ron Talpert and the Coens worked in the independent film, particularly the Evil Dead people, who raised their money through dentists and vendors. Now someone was on-set, reminding them that their budget did not take into account union fees and that some scenes needed to look bigger. Sadly, this effectively castrated both Raimi and the Coens, making Crimewave seem more like a self-parody of both camps before they'd even established themselves.

The film concerns Victor Ajax (Reed Birney, forced on the filmmakers when the studio refused Campbell the part), a technician for the Trend-Odegard Security. He's on the way to the electric chair at the beginning for a crime he claims he didn't commit, and we then cut to flashbacks of his story.

The crimes in question -- a string of murders -- were committed by a group of hitmen posing as, appropriately enough, exterminators of "all sizes." Mr. Trend hires them to kill his partner when he catches Odegard planning to sell the company to an oily huckster named "Renaldo the Hell" (Bruce Campbell). In true Coens fashion, this simple crime goes terribly awry when they accidentally kill Trend as well and someone witnesses the murder. Victor doesn't know about all this, as he is too busy attempting to woo his perfect woman, Nancy (Sheree J. Wilson), who cares little for Vic but desires the dismissive Renaldo.

The Three Stooges have played an active role in Raimi's writing throughout his career, but never has it been so pronounced (or so poorly integrated). The director utilizes the tricks that made The Evil Dead so inventive -- the cheap rigs that allow doors to pop open and slam closed by themselves, zooming close-ups -- are on display, but they're made to emphasize a physical gag or beyond-hammy acting. The actors all laugh in overblown manners, and any time someone is hit or falls down it's accompanied by a silly sound effect. Not a single line passes without a sight gag, hammy dialogue or a pratfall, and it makes everything simply too referential and parodic and it robs the action scenes of any power. Occasionally it works, such as the scene where Mrs. Trend drops a potted plant to alert help, only for Faron to catch it, and then only for the pot to fall off the grasped plant, but for the most part it simply falls flat.

I realize that the dialogue is supposed to be cheesy and it's supposed to play up the stilted absurdity of so many noir pictures, but it just gets old after a while. Only Campbell pulls it off well, because the man was born to be ridiculous. He's not just hammy like everyone else; he calls to mind the acting style of the '30s and '40s. He's perfect for the role, which was heavily expanded when producers refused to let Campbell play the lead, and he makes you wish that someone in charge had the foresight to recognize his talent. Also worth mentioning is Paul L. Smith as Faron, who doesn't pull of the annoying laugh but makes up for it with a deep growl that actually inspires some chills here and there.

There's really not much to say about this film. Both Raimi and the Coens draw inspiration from classic trash, be it horror flicks (Raimi) or pulp noir (the Coen brothers), but here it's just too broad and too poorly married to the action. The two groups would collaborate again on the Coens' maligned The Hudsucker Proxy, which also worked as a pastiche of old noir but had the wit and acting talent behind it to make it work even if it isn't top-tier Coens. It's strange to watch this mostly unfunny film, one that contains only traces of the Coens' and Raimi's strength, and realize that the Coens would next make Raising Arizona and Raimi Evil Dead 2, two of the funniest movies of the last 25 years. All of this makes Crimewave a curiosity for Raimi and Coens die-hards over anything overly entertaining, and it ranks as one of the weakest efforts from either party.

-camera movement actually looks less refined that his debut

The Evil Dead

My recent love affair with Burn Notice has reminded me how much I adore Bruce Campbell, and how woefully little of his filmography I've seen (though I can certainly see myself going to the grave without trolling through his Sci-Fi channel TV movies). Along with Sam Raimi's barnstorming return to form, Drag Me to Hell, I was in the mood to revisit the start of both their careers and then travel forward through their resumés. While I won't do this as stringently as, say, my planned John Carpenter retrospective, I do plan to at least run through Raimi's filmography and the more renowned Campbell fare.

Anyway, back to the film at hand. The Evil Dead, Raimi and Campbell's debuts, took the horror community by storm when it at last hit wide distribution in 1983, two years after its completion and exhibition in Detroit and four years since Raimi started working on the project. Raimi secured the measly $375,000 budget with his short film Within the Woods, a 30-minute, $1,600 short film also starring Campbell that ostensibly served the same function as a television pilot: to attract investors for a full-length version. The rest, as they say is history.

But what makes The Evil Dead such an enduring cult favorite and its protagonist inarguably the most beloved horror film hero of all time? Perhaps I just answered my own question: you see, where Raimi excelled -- and where so many imitators fall short -- is his focus on the the victim and not the monster. Campbell's Ash Williams is a fresh-faced, terrified All-American in this installment, but eventually he would grow into the biggest bad-ass the horror genre ever produced. Yet even here he is the center of the film. Strange, terrible things happen all around him, but we're made to consider how it affects him, not how brilliant or evil the villain is. Though he's stuck with some rotten dialogue that he delivers with matching stiffness ("Why are you bastards tormenting me?!"), Campbell adds a human element to Ash, and you can see his suffering when he must eventually kill his possessed gal.

Then again, it might just be the insanity depicted on-screen. The Evil Dead is awash in the sort of gore that you rarely saw at the pinnacle (or nadir, depending on your tastes) of '70s exploitation films. Raimi and his team ingeniously rigged their sets with swings that way in idle wind, cellars that pop open with no visible hands pushing or pulling them. It puts you on your edge before the first drop of blood is spilled. But when it is, oh boy. As Ash must face the demons possessing his friends one by one, they spew blood and vomit everywhere. At some point, you begin to wonder if it took two years to film because for every day of shooting, it must have taken four to clean up to shoot again.

From the start, Raimi plays up B-movie clichés for his own demented use. To say that the plot is simple would be an understatement of almost British proportions: the five college kids rent a cabin deep in the woods of Tennessee to rent for the weekend, and soon they stumble into an excavation site in the cellar. Inside, they discover a knife, a tape recording, and the Necromicon, the Book of the Dead. They play the tape, which just so happens to contain recitations of the book, and soon demons start tormenting them.

It's a tried and true horror trope delivered with some of the cheesiest dialogue you'll ever hear. Unlike the sequels, though, it's hard to tell whether these lines are meant to be cheesy or if Raimi has some growing to do. Considering that this sort of dialogue has found its way into his subsequent films, even the Spider-Man trilogy (most notably in the third installment, which he co-wrote), I'd say that Raimi's never really been one with words.

He makes up for it, however, in the staging. While Raimi has never really been able to pen dialogue that wasn't at least intentionally corny, he is an adept storyteller. Most horror films spend 20 minutes setting up the characters, another 20 of scattered exposition concerning whatever evil the characters must face, and then it's all jump scares leading up to some final showdown. The Evil Dead crams all of its exposition into the first 20 minutes, which unsettle from the start with the brief drive over a rotting bridge, and that feeling that the cabin is alive somehow.

How did these kids from Michigan State end up in Appalachia, and how did they find and book this secluded cabin which surely must not have come with many referrals? Why am I asking these sorts of questions? They're there because that's where the demons are, and Raimi is far too concerned with ratcheting up tension to fever pitches from the start to give a damn about the logic of a possession story. He slams his foot down on the gas pedal the instant the audio recording finishes reciting and never lets up, yet there is actually a modicum of taste to the affair.

Take the infamous rape scene, in which Linda is violated by the branches of a demonic tree: it's horrific and exploitative, but not in the sense that so many horror films play up rape. No shot lingers for too long in the sequence, and it cuts away before getting too graphic. This scene is truly terrifying, and Raimi makes sure that it never becomes even unintentionally funny. Later, when Ash's sister and girlfriend, both possessed, attempt to convince him that they're all better now, the result is genuinely chilling. The sequels played up the absurdity of the gore and the dialogue, but Raimi's commitment here makes The Evil Dead truly scary even on a repeat viewing.

There's also the bonus of his strikingly original direction. There are so many canted angles in The Evil Dead you practically expect Harry Lime to jump out at any minute to discuss cuckoo clocks. The music plays a much smaller role in the film compared to most horror flicks, leaving Raimi to pick up the slack with his breakneck editing and the mad rush of camera movement so original it is now known as the "Raimi cam." The Coens, long-time friends of Raimi, helped out on the film, and their early films bristle with his influence. Imagine, two of the best filmmakers to come out of the independent scene and indeed modern masters of their craft, spent their first few films aping the B-moviest B-move ever made.

I remember sitting down with this film for the first time a mere year ago and was bowled over that the seemingly average director of the Spider-Man films (by that time I'd been consumed in backlash for the franchise, though I plan to revisit and re-evaluate them in the near future), could make something so original even though it practically congealed from the corn-syrup blood of B-movies past. I'd never seen such gore, and not in the way that today's torture porn depicts, that of gritty "realism" and nauseating, forced terror. No, Raimi understands the absurdity of it all, even when he plays it with a straight face. The Evil Dead received wide distribution in part because of a rave review from horror icon Stephen King, who called it "a black rainbow of terror," (as you can see, another one of his comments made the poster) and that's a damn good summary. Roger Ebert has a maxim that states, "It's not what a film is about but how it is about it." The Evil Dead looks pedestrian on paper, but in the hands of Raimi, it's a classic.

Burn Notice — Season 2

I love television shows with flawed first seasons: when a show debuts with unexpected critical (and maybe commercial) success -- Veronica Mars, The Sopranos, Lost -- subsequent seasons tend to fall short of unfair expectations. But a promising show with a good cast and some writing that needs smoothing often ramps up in its second season to justify its renewal: take Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Simpsons, for instance. Burn Notice had the premise and the cast to warrant a second season, but its plots were too repetitious. But with the introduction of a potential story arc in the finale, I looked forward to seeing the writers tighten things up a bit.

The second season is indeed a notable step up from the first but, ironically, it's the weekly plots that made me tune in over the ongoing arc concerning the truth behind Michael's burning. Where the last season seemed to consist of little more than a string of cartel lieutenants, smugglers and the odd thug, here we deal with marks as varied as rap moguls and former spies, medical black marketeers and Russian mafiosos.


These standalone jobs allow the cast to solidify their excellent chemistry and to explore the characters further. Gabrielle Anwar's Fiona is the best ass-kicking female on TV since Battlestar Galactica came to an end and took Starbuck with it. I imagine someone will snatch the title from her if and when Dollhouse picks up steam, but for the moment no one can compare. Fi breaks off their sort-of relationship with Michael in the first episode of the new season, allowing her to build on her own. It's strange for a show to go from a relationship to a "will-they-won't-they" scenario and not the other way around, but it nicely allows both characters to flesh out their sexual tension while growingindependently of one another. Appropriate for such a character, we see Fi take cases involving abused or murdered kids and women to heart, which allows her to focus the fiery personality we got in the first season.

Jeffery Donovan only solidifies Michael Westen as a great TV character. Donovan's timing is even sharper, but now he adds his repertoire of terrible accents which make Mike even funnier. Bad accents are usually the sign of desperation in comedy, but Donovan does not play them up for laughs. By delivering them with Michael's stone face and confidence, the humor is that people buy those voices willingly. He also gets some nice moments with his mother that aren't quite as forced and obvious as the first season's. SharonGless sadly doesn't appear as often (though she's in most of the episodes), but she pulls off the chain-smoking heart of the show with aplomb. I also like the touch that Michael, whose career required him to be a master liar, can fool anyone but his mom.

Then, there's Campbell. I noted in my previous review that Campbell stole the show routinely in the first season but that he was still holding back his usual self a bit. Here, he gives himself some slack and the show reaps tons of gold from him. Campbell's status as a B-movie icon makes it easy to dismiss him as a face (and chin) instead of abona fide actor, but watch how quickly he can turn from flippant goofiness to chilling severity without a moment's pause and it's hard to write him off as just "Ash." His highlight, and indeed the highlight of the entire season, must be hisantagonizing of the vindictive rapper (played by Method Man) in "Bad Blood": in a 45-second spree of comic gold, Sam attempts to antagonize and trap the producer by insulting rap, professing his love for Kenny G and even attempting to rap himself. It's the funniest thing I've seen on television since JackDonaghy attempting group therapy with Tracy by acting out Sanford & Son on 30 Rock.

But apart from the humor and the character growth in these disconnected stories, the plots are simply excellent. Virgil, a fairly inconsequential character from the first season, returns to ask Michael for a favor, but we discover that Virgil might also be seeking to rekindle an oldrelationship with Madeline. "Double Booked" pits Michael against a former colleague who serves to give us an insight to the kind of person Michael might have been back when he was in the amoral spy game. "Bad Breaks" contains perhaps the most inspired of the weekly plots by mixing a heist with Home Alone. Featuring a guest spot by Firefly's own Mark Sheppard (Badger) as the lead robber, the episode makes Michael's attempts to foil the robbery and save hostages gripping even as you're laughing along with his constant mind games and sabotage.


The "Burn" story, by contrast, takes a while to get off the ground. That sensual, mysterious voice on the cell phone giving orders to Michael belongs to Carla (Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer), who ostensibly got Michael burned so he would work for her and her organization. She seductively coerces Michael into completing his new assignments by threatening to kill his friends and family and all the usual stuff. Poor Mike: first he loses his spy job, and now he has sinister jobs forced upon him. It's a nice foil for the relatively mundane assignments he continues to take from those in need. Sadly,Helfer is given little to play with here; a shame, considering how well she perfectly the evil seductress on BSG. She actually loses some menace when we see her in person and she stops simply being the unseen voice.

Thankfully, we get a more hands-on villain to liven things up, though he doesn't get the face time he needs until the second half. The deranged spy "wrangler" Victor (Michael Shanks) impresses from the start, though; where Carla's wrangling consists of veiled threats delivered with the sinister tone of aprofessional , Victor looks and acts like he'd like nothing more than to go find Mike's friends and family and kill them himself. It's a damn shame that he drops out of the scene so soon after he first appears, but he comes back with a vengeance in the final stretch and really makes the arc work.

The finale isn't the finest episode of the season -- "Double Booked," "Rough Seas" and "Bad Breaks" are better -- but it's a step up from the last season's impressiveender and it sets up an even more promising future for the show. It's weird to think that I never bothered to wonder about Michael's old enemies, though theshow's fast pace wraps you up in the moment. The idea that we might see ghosts from Michael's past come to Miami looking for revenge is even more enticing than a shadow operation forcing Mike to do assignments for them.

Burn Notice's second season is a marked improvement all-around, one that elevates the show into an indispensable piece of fun rather than a cool show you can drift in and out of. Unlike the last season, it's difficult to pick any weak moments, as the addition of an arc gives each episode a second chance to redeemitself if a plot doesn't work. Now I just need to catch up with the new season on Hulu, and I can experience this wonderful series in real time. I hope waiting a week in between episodes doesn't hurt too much.

Burn Notice — Season 1

The first thing that grabs your attention in Burn Notice is its disturbingly incessant glamor shots of Miami, that fetid den of gauche architecture designed to make the entire city look like an ostentatious playground for the wealthy. Cityscape shots always suggest that a show will simply gloss over the real innards of the locale in favor of the grand Hollywood look. It's not the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a show, particularly one about a private investigator who must deal with the seedy aspects of city life.

About halfway through the pilot, however, the establishing shots will be the last thing on your mind. Burn Notice takes the familiar idea of the private eye and gives it a unique twist, but its greatest strength lies in its pitch-perfect main cast and their effortless rapport with one another. Whether the main plots hold your interest -- which they sadly fail to do in several of the season's 11 episodes -- the show is buoyed by the interactions of these off-beat but believable characters.


Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), a freelance international spy, receives the titular burn notice while operating in Nigeria. As he explains in narration, you can't just fire a spy; you have to completely remove them from the grid. Suddenly, Michael's passport is flagged, his bank account frozen and his contacts unresponsive, leaving him to fend for himself with his cover blown. He shoots his way to an airport and wakes up in Miami, where he must reluctantly reconnect with his estranged mother while looking for a job to fit his particular skill set. Before long, he finds himself helping out needy people that allows him to use his intelligence background to investigate not terrorists, but small-time criminals (for a fee, of course).

There's something tantalizing about watching Westen trying to apply his sophisticated training on a shoestring budget, especially considering the people he must now spy on. In his previous line of work, he was someone working with unlimited resources, infiltrating poorly funded terrorist cells. Oh sure, such organizations make money through oil, drug, weapons trading and the like, but Michael just needed to keep his cover. Now he not only has to keep his cool; he has to take on criminals who are often well-connected in the richest parts of the city. Yes, he takes on his fair share of thugs, but the real villains are the higher-ups in drug cartels, the human traffickers, the gunrunners. It's a subtle inversion that makes Westen's quick thinking all the more impressive.

We get an insight into his thought process via his excellent voiceovers. Normally the downside of noir/detective stories, Burn Notice's narrations are reminiscent of Veronica Mars' in their wit and originality. Michael isn't telling us stuff we already know (or, worse, spoiling potential character development through easy exposition) but rather explains in quick, amusing bursts how people hiding in houses are always too busy worrying about shots coming through the door that they never worry about someone shooting through the weak plaster of the walls, or how to convince a suspicious mark to buy a cover I.D. These narrations add to both the comedy of the show as well as the technical details of the spy game.

But it wouldn't work nearly as well, if at all, without Donovan selling it. When it comes to television, most actors take a bit of time to find their characters. It's only natural, as the writers themselves take a bit of time to flesh them out: consider how much a Buffy or Fred Burkle or Jimmy McNulty changed in a single season, to say nothing of longer arcs. Yet Donovan is secure in his role from the start: his comic timing is as deadly as the weapons he's always brandishing, and he can sell any cover with a fearsome stone face.


Aiding Westen are two equally interesting characters, played by equally imbibing actors. Michael's ex-girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), formerly a member of the IRA, helps him get to Miami and provides the pretty face needed to distract the hired hands of the big players. Plus, she more than knows how to hold her own in a fight, to say nothing of her propensity to rig explosives on anything and everything. The only downside to her character is that she's defined mostly by her sexual tension and relationship with Michael even though she's clearly got enough personality and backstory to work as her own character. She also provides a nice foil for the other woman in Michael's life, his mother, Madeline (Sharon Gless). Michael ran away from home when he was 17 because of his abusive father, and his comical dealings with her and her mundane issues carry an undercurrent of mutual feelings of regret and betrayal that occasionally rise to the surface.

But it's Bruce Campbell, of course, who steals the show as schlubby, retired Navy SEAL Sam Axe. A mojito-loving lout with connections ranging from the Pentagon to the sports bar on the corner, Sam is the one who generally points Michael to his next assignment, always assuring his friend that it will be an "easy job" no matter how many times it turns out to be the opposite. Yet his relationship with Fi is even more rewarding, as the two detest each other, and their incessant insults provide much of the season's comedy. Campbell has a few moments of completely serious drama which he plays superbly, but the real treat is his absurd demeanor, which Campbell plays up like the B-movie master that he is. His shtick is fairly subdued here, either to make it to TV or because the writers haven't fully tapped into his gold mine of a persona, but he still stands out in this marvelous, small cast.

All three of the main players play off one another as if they've been doing it for years, and frankly they eclipse a great deal of the writing of this season. It's not that the scripts are bad, per se; they just bleed together after a time. Michael is hunting for the people who burned him, but that only substantially enters the story in isolated spots, though he's usually ducking cars filled with Feds or CIA agents. The finale, however, suggests the start of a solid arc to take the pressure off the slight same-y nature of the weekly criminals, which will hopefully give the actors something meaty to do aside from dazzling with their timing and interplay.

So, the writing weighs the season down, as does the direction, which is too stylized for its own good. Like Chuck's first season, these 11 episodes blur together in the middle and are clearly looking for a concrete direction. Chuck brings up a number of similarities, as both are spy shows with neat twists with characters that are more concretely defined than their surroundings; I find myself sticking with these shows because I loved these characters from the moment I saw them, and I'm willing to see more even if they do the same thing every week. Nevertheless, Burn Notice doesn't hit many blatantly sour notes, and some tighter scripts and toned-down camera editing are all this show really needs to take off in a big way.