athomson-4

The acting is terrible. O'Connel turns in a performance that's meant to be "brooding" but comes across as brattish.

The guy playing Stirling has the charisma of a plank of wood, it's distracting. Alfie Allen has a go at playing a stiff upper lip "toff" but you can see the performance, it's really distracting.

The production spent money on sets and costume, the locations are amazing. The plot is broadly accurate to historic events but they added a love interest that is entirely fictional and serves practically no benefit, other than to perhaps show Stirling has some emotion, sadly beyond the skill of the actor to convey.

And somehow they make the action sequences boring. Far too many scenes show the men lounging in camp getting drunk, when they do go on raids the scenes pass by far too quickly and usually serve as little more than an excuse for O'Connell to shout and berate his own men.

I was so bored, it's one of those shows you watch because it's so bad.

It's disappointingly dull.

They've done what we all worried they'd do: They took the coolest character in the Star Wars universe and made him lame.

There's some truly wonderful flashback moments, Boba's time in the desert being a particular highlight.

But the main story, Boba liberating Mos Eisley/Tattoine from the pykes is so meh it's annoying.

The most badass character in the show is Fennec, which is fine, but the fascination with Boba is that *he* is meant to be the most badass character. There's a very cool sequence in the finale that is all Fennec. That should have been Boba, sadly, Robert Rodriguez doesn't know how to work with this material so we get a lot of mis-steps, false starts and the whole thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

It could have been great. Instead, it's distinctly average.