Django

But it's not.

Assuming you have HDR on your TV and you can see what is happening...

The story is convoluted and the flashbacks not handled very well.

The acting is very variable, even by the recognised names.

While the photography is good, it does not make up for the bad acting. Characters performances vary between wooden to manic.

And the accents. Very poor, especially Ms Rapace, most distracting.

The Django character has appeared in several spaghetti westerns over the last fifty years. This series does follow in the established genre but has sacrificed clarity for pretentiousness.

If they make a remake, remember to turn the lights on.

I'm from Belgium, so I know Matthias Schoonaerts is a very good actor. However, in this series his acting limits itself to raising his head very slowly while desperately trying to look like a bad ass and making short grunts and growls which I hope weren't in the script.

I'm focussing at Schoonaerts because he played Django, but the other characters in this series perform on the same level. They can do better. I know they can. I recognise most of them from other programs where they did a fine job!

It's not just the acting though. The whole cinematography is a bit off. The footage is either too dark or even a bit too shakey. At first I didn't know what it was I didn't like about it. It's that subtle.

And last but not least: the story. It's just not strong enough to play in the same league as the Django westerns the producers are aiming for.

Pity.

It's hard to take this show seriously, especially when the character Elizabeth speaks...I finally realised - she sounds like Moira from Schitts Creek when she does her weird accent trying to buy a car. It unintentionally turns the show into a comedy. At least a laugh is a welcome break from the tedious plot. A carefully curated slow moving show can be riveting, this is...well, boring. Churning out a lot of yawn worthy and trivial tropes, between more odd accents and attempting to draw out "secrets" that are unsurprising and lazy. More than one accent in the show changes within a sentence, creating a sense of disorientation in terms of where the story is meant to be set or where the hell anyone is from.

Obviously the expectation for celebrities to remain youthful looking is unreasonable and sad. I apologise to the actress, as I don't mean to be picking on her, but again, Noomi Rapace, who plays Elizabeth, has clearly overdone the cheek filler to the point that it is obviously misshapen in the first episode. Getting filler to the point of deformity and a very unnatural shape is sad to see.

The best part about the show is the surprise (to me) appearance of Abigail Thorn, of Philosophy Tube renown. Abigail shines in her role and breaks up the otherwise lacklustre performances.

I am struggling through episode 3 and really finding it hard to continue to see it out.

Noomi rapace actually does suck in her role, what was she thinking?, absolute terrible 'accent', could she really not know this?, is she really this vacuous?, I guess!, many others have said the scenes are too dark, very true, in the dark scenes some of the cast cannot be seen, ?, the writer and the director are terrible, it's just not worthy of watching, kind of a fever dream, funny, the names of those involved in writing and directing seem to be Italian, is this a satire of the old spaghetti westerns?, is that it?, I just gave up in the middle of episode two, skip this disaster of a dumb show.

Not sure reviews focusing on the mishmash of accents really the point as I imagine accents would have been mongrel mix of immigrant ones back then. Not sure personal comments re Noomi Rapace were necessary either. I was unaware of previous versions so had no expectations but after 2 episodes felt this was trying too hard to have gravitas. The acting stilted with lots of pregnant pauses, knowing stares and as ever liberal use of flashbacks with most of the action in darkness presumably to avoid continuity issues and the need to dress sets.

So it passes the time while playing video games, as a bit too tedious to give full attention to. Hardly the searing new drama the ads proclaim.