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Mann directed this self-produced embarrassment that no intelligent human being can watch for more than 10 minutes because he couldn't afford a director. He produced it himself because no one else would give him a job. Nor could he afford any decent actors or a decent script. He still managed to spend $70 million on this trash that only made a tenth of that at the box office.

I mean casting a dumb jock as a hacker and filling up the rest of the cast with Asian extras, what was he thinking? What kind of hacker needs so many gunfights to do his job? Making money with a movie about something as geeky as hacking is almost impossible. Geeks are the guys you give wedgies to, not watch movies about. Passing off a jock as a geek? Well the Wachowskis did it with Matrix but Michael Mann, you are too old to succeed at such sideways thinking.

Michael Mann, you are way past your use-by date. You should have taken your winnings after Collateral and retired.

Playing Shakespeare with various NY accents is like playing Moliere with "Allo Allo" accents. It's just crap. The original Shakespeare, performed at the Globe in London, is a lot like Irish English. It is nothing like the squawky dialects of the colonies. Words like "Thou took'st a beggar; wouldst have made my throne a seat for baseness" sound credible in either the original Early Modern English or in standard Oxford English but in Bronxese, Jerseyese, or Manhattenese they sound simply like ludicrous crap.

If that weren't enough the whole production with its pretentious, foreboding, ponderous atmosphere utterly lacks continuity and energy. It's just a sequence of meaningless lines uttered in incongruous settings by talented people whose desperate attempts to breathe life into this corpse of a movie are more cringeworthy than praiseworthy. Talent ceases to be talent when expended so pointlessly.

The Fall lost 1.2 million viewers in its 2nd season at the beeb and for good reason. The show degenerated into a pathos of utterly improbable police incompetence, emanating mostly from the supposedly hot-shot chief inspector played by Gillian Anderson, whose entire function appeared to be to watch interminable surveillance and evidence videos while arching her brow and heaving soft sighs, in between wardrobe changes in the washroom where we could get a good look at her cleavage and assess the quality of her latest boob job.

Cops swarmed around the perp but lost track of him constantly, failed to locate any evidence, sent armies to tail him but never once thought of putting a camera in his house, held countless meetings where everyone would moronically stare at a screen displaying the waveform of a voice recording (because if they had recorded video they would have caught him in the 1st season), yet failed to make even a positive voice match when they finally nabbed the guy.

As the show ran out of steam in its second season, clumsily-inserted vignettes began to appear about Ulster loyalist former-terrorist-turned-gangsters and pedophile Catholic priests. An Ulster loyalist gangster with apparent patronage in high places terrorized the police, the lamentable story of the island's Catholic orphanages was alluded to, and a pedophile priest was put on display, but all of it sanitized and depoliticized to the point of WTF irrelevance.

Predictably, more people watched Masterchef than did the show's finale on the BBC, which drew even with a documentary on Apple.