JOE’s DVD & BluRay Round-up: 24’s Ticking Clocks and Christmas bells

Welcome back to JOE’s DVD & BluRay round-up where Kiefer Sutherland finds out that 24 isn’t what it used to be and Jim Carry discovers that those Muppets are a hard act to follow.

24 Season 8

After nearly a decade of rogue agents, unlikely plot twists and a small continents worth of disposable terrorist types; the clock has finally run out on Jack Bauer with season eight of 24.

The once cutting edge show that dared to cast an African American actor in the role of the President of the United States and managed to make every episode play out in ‘real time’ began to run out of ideas around season five and after the insane plot twist and-back-from-the-dead hi-jinks that marked season seven, it was clear that the show was living on borrowed time.

The axe did indeed fall and many fans hoped that the 24’s final season would pull out all the stops with a nothing-to-lose approach that would redeem their loyalty and reclaim the show's reputation as a risk taker.

Sadly, all of the bad little habits that have sullied later seasons are all on display here such as an over reliance on queasy and extreme interrogation, pointless and overlong sub-plots that take over whole episodes and, worst of all, traitors within CTU for the umpteenth time. That’s not to say that season eight is predictable, the show and its characters are just far to random for that, but even when you are thrown by a twist it’s hard to feel any kind of thrill when such events have slipped into cliché long ago.

This time around the conspiracy-laden plot revolves around a peace deal-seeking fictional Muslim county, an evil ex president and some Russian mafia goons with some bootleg nuclear weapons. Believability doesn’t even come into it and because the show has managed to kill off all its best characters, the burden of carrying the whole thing falls on Kiefer Sutherland’s shoulders.

And thank heavens for that, because Sutherland’s particular brand of tortured emotion and steely eyed intensity remains the one thing that holds the show together. Despite Jack Bauer somehow being at the centre of eight really bad days, you strangely buy into his world and root for him even when he commits acts of savage torture.

Anyone new to 24 should go ahead and give this a miss and instead start with the series best entry, season two. Everyone else should ignore season eight and preserve their memory of a great show that somehow managed to go out with a whimper rather than the big bang it deserved.

A Christmas Carol

As far as we are concerned, if you want to make a version of Charles Dickens' classic festive tale that doesn’t have Muppets in it, you might as well not bother because odds are that it just won’t be as charming or as entertaining as the glorious Muppet Christmas Carol.

Director Robert Zemeckis at least has a good reason to try with the whizz-bang of motion capture animation at his disposal and the vocal talents of Jim Carry, but unfortunately that hasn’t stopped this latest version from feeling fairly redundant.

Part of the problem is that the film sticks rigorously close to the source material, so much so that it fails to deliver any sort of surprise.The Muppet version worked because of the addition of, well, Muppets and the second best version, Scrooged worked because of Bill Murray and a good tinkering with the formula.

In this take, we know where each turn of the story is going, beat after beat, and as the film goes on it’s hard to get involved beyond being impressed by the odd animated sequence that takes your breath away.

It’s not all bad: the animation and design is top notch with Scrooge rendered in incredible craggy detail and the motion capture performance from Carrey gives the old git real character and life.

Everything else has had the same level of detail lavished upon it and the whole movie looks like the ultimate Christmas card in motion.

Jim Carrey makes for a pretty decent Ebenezer and thanks to the magic of motion capture, his rubber face and exaggerated lanky movements shine though, clearly showing that this approach to filmmaking has a bright future. Unfortunately this also means that no-one can match him and everyone else comes across as flat and uninteresting.

All this adds up to a serviceable Christmas flick that might just entertain kids but has little chance of keeping older audiences from checking their watches every five minutes

Leo Stiles