Network: NBC; Genre: Sci-Fi Action; Content Rating: TV-PG (for comic book violence); Available: DVD; Perspective: Contemporary (star range: 1 - 4);
Seasons Reviewed: Series (1 season)
"Bionic Woman" barrels onto the fall 2007 schedule with a typhoon of hype that it doesn't deserve and outspoken armchair critic repulsion that it also probably doesn't deserve. Worst show ever? Hardly. As with "Cavemen", the internet rebellion is on overdrive again to take something down.
A remake of the 1976 series of the same name (with a slogan taken from the 1975 series of a different name), NBC's "Bionic Woman" updates Jamie Summers and her ear, arm and legs (and installs a bionic eye) for a new generation. Now, that special effects have reached the technological point that they can be pulled off on TV cheaply without looking so, 70s sci-fi is fair game for any high-tech re-imagining.
I'll admit, I was taken with these visual effects in the first episode, when Jamie (the bodacious Michelle Ryan, perfectly up for all the action) escapes from the lab that re-assembled her and runs through a forest. We actually see her legs moving, instead of the blurred Tom Welling that dashes through "Smallville". Soon the pilot climaxes in a blurry bionic-woman-on-bionic-woman fight scene shot with such shot cuts it's guaranteed to pull you out of the action with it's trickery. As is all of the show's fighting. We can make a woman run at lightening speed look real but we can't make a fight scene look like it wasn't created entirely in the editing suite.
But let's talk about "Smallville". On that comic book series the action sequences are creatively constructed and bring to a head the emotional strands of the story. The acting, at least from the supporting players, is quite good and the show is a cinematic production, visually restrained and musically appropriated. "Bionic" is a cold, shallow exercise in frenzied fight scenes and time-tested shoot-outs.
The show doesn't have an original bone in it's body; and not just because it's a remake. Like any big budget production it plays everything safe from soup to nuts, following even it's own formula strictly. Jamie works for a secret government agency, led by Miguel Ferrer (still playing the gruff but concerned team leader from "Crossing Jordan"), who sends her out on assignments to foil terrorists across the country and around the world. It's "Chuck" without the quirky humor, "Heroes" without the invention, "Smallville" without the heart. It may be apples and oranges but look at the ho-hum episode in which Jamie returns to college for an assignment and compare that to a similar and far more inspired episode of "Chuck" where that show's unlikely secret agent returns to college.
I recognize this is all criticism you either know already or just assumed from the show's status as a remake. But you'd have to see it to know how just about everything down to the studs doesn't work. It's wildly over-directed and to counter-act that it's blandly scripted. It is a hollow-to-the-core Hollywood production, mechanically assemble out of condescension and laziness, betting that viewers will sit slack-jawed through the 50 minutes of routine, talky set-up just to see Jamie bust out a bionic feat of strength and save the day in the final 5 minutes. That's all we'll get and we'll be lucky to get it.
The biggest insult? For my money it's the way the show takes "Breath Me", a song that lent such beauty and such an emotional punch in the gut to the "Six Feet Under" finale and just slap-dash lays it over a training montage. Heresy!
* ½ / 4
