Anthony McReavy

While this show makes Rambo feel like it was written by Ken Loach, the real problem is it's soo boring. Basically Rambo: First Blood with none of the tension, excitement or interest. Partly because it's 6 hours of TV squeezed into 90 minutes of story, but also because - remarkably - it has none of the characterisation, depth, charisma or charm of Rambo... Chris Pratt's character is a Navy Seal. That's not a description of what he does, that's his entire character. That's as far as we go into his personality, with occasionally beardy SF types helpfully telling you he's 'a legend'. Yes there are flashbacks to his family life, but wife and daughter are equally one dimensional and both from Central Casting's Action Hero's Disposable Family box. His daughter is especially annoying - clearly the writers haven't met an actual human child before. She's a ten year old drawing toddler's pictures of Mommy and Dah-dy with crayons, and wittering on like no child has ever done. ("Will the little bird live, Dah-dy?" "Will you be ok, Dah-dy?" etc etc.) Perhaps she's had a brain injury, which would explain the kindergarten artwork. When what predictably happens, our intial reaction was 'Ho hum' (and my wife's generally quite a nice person). This pushes Pratt into what would normally be styled a murderous 'spree', or 'rampage' but these terms imply more dynamism than his callous, soulless mass-murder plod involves. (It also means we have endless flashbacks, often of the same incident, which is supposed to be portentous or meaningful, but is just tedious, and not just because his weird daughter is burbling toddler twaddle in the background. There's no tension as we know there's a list; we know he's going to work through it; and because he's, y'know, a Navy Seal, he's going to find it easy and not get stopped. Each nasty sadistic killing, more ho-hums. The main achievement of the programme is to defy 3,000 years of dramatic convention and give the protagonist no arc and no development. At the end of it all, he's exactly the same: a really boring Chris Pratt looky-likey. The only really frightening part, which made me genuinely troubled, was when I paused it every so often to see how much longer we had to get through in an episode and the words "Season 1" leapt out on the caption. Please Lord, no. If there's a second Terminal List, please put me down as the first name on it.