Hold Tight

I mean it is watchable. Just don't expect anything new. Also don't rly understand why that one man was chosen to act as a teenager, he looks rly out of place with beard and everything. He looked more like 30 year old than a 16yr old.

A thriller that lacks the wild twists and turns, for the most part its predictable and anticlimactic. The middle four episodes are filler and delay tactics. Acting is decent.

The number of low scores tells me that either 1) the reviewers are unable to follow films with subtitles, or 2) they watched the dubbed version. Both speak to the value of those same reviewers' opinions. This is not perfect, but it IS very well written, filmed, directed, and acted. It's also, virtually, the perfect length at six episodes. Watch it!

Yet another modern day drama where insolent teenagers have the upper hand. What ever happened to parenting and discipline ? The parents of Kaja were just wet lettuces, she was never reprimanded or questioned once about her behaviour, they just sat looking at her as she flounced upstairs ! As for Adam's parents - they were the ones who needed therapy, from HIM ! What a pain.

The story was too long, too drawn out, and with lots of fast forwarding I cut down the episodes from 49 minutes to around 30, so got through it much quicker. Thankfully.

As for the translation issues. I NEVER do dubbing, with subtitles at least you hear the actors voices instead of some American doing the overvoicing while sat in a studio watching the film.

I didn't love Hold Tight as much as I expected to; I didn't enjoy the changes that were made. Ordinarily I can separate the adaptation from the book and view them as separate entities but I feel as though reading the book is the only reason I understand the motivation of some of the characters, and that they weren't written as well in the adaptation. I felt as though the heart of the novel was the father/son relationship and the parent/child relationships across all the characters which I feel has been marred in the adaptation by having so strong a focus on the younger characters and introducing some that are superfluous. I understand why some characters had to change, as the adaptations can't have Hester or Loren, and Pawel is a good way to amalgamate the roles of Hester and Mo. I didn't like the changes made to Ania's character to compensate for the loss of Susan though, I feel like Mike was so central to the book - his heart, his character, his impact on others - and I missed that in the series.

The real gift of Harlan Coben's writing is his unique ability to take readers on an emotional journey - to create hope and fear, to put us in the shoes of his characters and invest in their wellbeing - it's not all about the mystery, it's about the connection. I did not feel that connection with the characters in this series - not between each other and not between them and the viewer. This is a real shame as other adaptations have successfully created that bond and drawn us in completely - something about this one just seems clumsy and as though the writers and actors themselves didn't connect with the source material.