Wednesday 22 September 2010

"I said I'm going to look into your cult problem"


Watching:

Of course the first thing a terrorist will say to the man whose been chasing him all around the world is to state where he comes from and how long he's been chasing terrorists, because naturally this is something that guy wouldn't know, and of course a glorified death squad commander is a natural first choice to lead a police unit with no clearly defined limits to their power while they operate on US soil, and of course a man will climb through the roof of a car in a gunfight to take up an unprotected position rather than go through the open door where he'd be protected by armed marines, of course a disciplined marine officer in full dress uniform still has manly stubble, of course a police officer will pull a gun on someone without identifying himself first, of course civilians five feet away from automatic gunfire will be surprised when gunmen appear moments later, of course a man who's just been shot through a window will outflank two running men with a head start through a shanty town, of course a man who's just found a sexually abused minor locked in a closet will insist on taking her in his manly arms instead of informing a female SOC officer, of course an Asian tourist liason has contacts in the Asian mafia, of course a Hawaiian of Asian descent has a leg to stand on when he accuses a white dude of not being local, of course there's nothing wrong with two grown men bribing a small child with candy and stuffed toys, of course the only two Hawaiians on the team are related, of course in a show shot in Hawaii - a state inhabited largely by Asians of Japanese descent - and arguably a good place to find Hawaiian actors those two Hawaiians are played by Koreans, of course a young girl will respect her father's absence from her life to be a policeman, of course it's integral to the plot that the only female officer on the team has to strip to her underwear on a mission, of course a police mole will recognize one of the very few Hawaiian officers on the Hawaaian police force immediately even though he only has a grainy cellphone photo to work with of her covering her face and she hasn't left the police academy yet, of course there's no need to find out who that mole is, of course you can drive a van through a wall, of course you can miss four people standing less than three feet away when you empty a clip from a fully automatic weapon, of course a 'clean' front business for people smuggling has a container in front of the office with about fifty illegal immigrants in it, of course those people getting found by police is just what they wanted after going to all that trouble and spending all that money to leave China, of course the people smuggler is actually a deeply conscientious family man whose marriage is invalidated by his being arrested and his wife and US citizen son will be deported as a consequence, of course all smuggling ships dock beside ramps, of course low-key smugglers carry automatic weapons when docked in a US port, of course there's room to drive a car on the deck of a cargo boat, and most importantly of all, of course Spike from Buffy can do an Irish accent.
Scholars of the English language may notice a subtle tone of mockery in my post, but despite that, Hawaii Five-0 is entertaining crap from the writers of Transformers and Star Trek that might have taken itself a bit too seriously but doesn't and an affable cast including him from Lost and her from Battlestar Galactica (though in fairness, I don't hold it against her) helps on that front. The theme tune (I couldn't find the proper remix from the show, but the above vid is more or less it) is, of course, compulsory, but a bit out of place in its cheesy brilliance even though the rest of the show is about good-looking pigs shooting at explosions.
It's good fun, but as laureates may have gathered already, not brain surgery, and if it was actually an objectively good show I probably wouldn't have liked it half as much - there's only so much of a straight face you can put on female cops in bikinis having beachside kung-fu throwdowns, after all.

No comments:

Post a Comment