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Gimme a double-dose of sugar, baby. |
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Check your local listings for showings of Back to Back Action Pack.
Ah, how delightful. Settling in before the cheery glow of the monitor, with a glass of wine and a bit of Bach on the stereo, preparing to review one of my favorite subjects. Cheesy syndicated television. Sure, I could examine a classic like Star Trek: the Next Generation, or a newcomer like Earth: Final Conflict, Stargate: SG1, or Beastmaster: It's Not The Same Without Marc Singer, but instead, I'll focus on the newest of the growing family of Sam Raimi/Rob Tapert series: the Back 2 Back Action hour. And brother, is it ever... to the detriment of everything else. We all know the story. Sam Raimi, the director best known for his over-the-top wacky horror movies usually starring Bruce Campbell, kicked off a surprise phenomenon in the early 1990s, a little show called Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The show was criticized for its campy fight scenes, its frequent anachronistic jokes, and its strip-mining of ancient history and mythology for one-hour episodes of varying seriousness and quality. It was incredibly silly and, yes, it deserves to be said again, campy. God, I loved that show. Hercules recently went off the air, but that doesn't mean the actors have stopped working.
Hercules begat Xena, which begat... well, a great many fantasies, but that's between Lucy Lawless and the Internet. Regardless, Hercules and Xena were a very successful pair. In each hour, you could count on about three great fight scenes, a few good jokes amidst a collection of passable ones, and, on the good episodes, a real sense of drama. Characters recurred and often crossed borders between shows. The Raimi formula (I would include ol' Rob, there, but I don't know what his contributions have been, except to Lucy... but that's another story...) was working. And then they retired Hercules, so they had to get a replacement. Naturally, they wanted their old pal Bruce Campbell in on it, and they wanted to provide work for their other friends from the Hercules/Xena days. I am firmly convinced that if I can become a friend of the Raimi brothers, I can be assured of television work whenever I want it. It would help if I were a Kiwi, but since I can't help not being born in New Zealand, I'll have to deal with what I have. Apparently, there was some trouble deciding whether to do a SF series, or a swashbuckler. Then someone (perhaps brother Ted) must have said "Hey, why don't we do both?" Thus was born the Back 2 Back Action Pack, two half-hour programs packaged into a single seamless unit. Or so goes the theory.
First, a brief summary of the shows. Cleopatra 2525 is the story of three women living underground because morphing machines called Baileys (I don't know why; an homage to Jimmy Stewart's Christmas role?) have taken over the surface. Two are natives to the time period: Hel (Gina Torres, formerly Nebula on Hercules) and Sarge (Victoria Pratt, formerly a Queen of the Amazons on Xena), who are involved in some sort of resistance to take back the surface from the machines. They travel up and down this one shaft that apparently runs through to the center of the earth; just about all the action happens on one or another level up or down this one shaft, and the levels don't seem to go more than a couple of hundred feet in a radius from the shaft. No, really. The third woman, Cleopatra (Jennifer Sky, formerly Amarice on Xena), was put into suspended animation in the first few years of the 21st century after she wouldn't wake up from the anaesthetic from her breast enhancement surgery. No, really. Sarge and Hel were in a medical facility for some emergency repair while Cleo was being thawed out. She woke up just as they all were attacked by a morphing killer machine in human disguise, called a Betrayer, but actually a Terminator by form and function. No, really. Made of liquid metal? You decide.
Jack of All Trades is somewhat more coherent. Just after the turn of the Nineteenth Century, American agent Jack Stiles (Bruce Campbell, veteran of almost every Sam Raimi production I've ever heard of) has managed to annoy President Tom Jefferson enough that he gets sent to the East Indies island of Pulau Pulau, to keep Napoleon's France from dominating the area. Upon arrival, he meets his partner, British agent and inventor Emilia Rothschild (Angela Dotchin, veteran of several different roles in Hercules and Xena), who is already a part of the social circle of the island's French leadership, Governor Croque (Stuart Devenie, alum of Hercules, Peter Jackson's The Frighteners and Meet The Feebles, believe it or not) and his military commander, Captain Brogard (Stephen Papps, previously seen on Hercules, Xena, Peter Jackson's Braindead, and Jane Campion's The Piano). Each episode is another adventure in which Jack and Emilia thwart Croque and Brogard's plans to help Croque's brother Napoleon try to take over the world! Zoit! Narf! No, wait, wrong show. Each show has a decent overall premise (excepting some wretched initial contrivances in Cleo), and the acting talent is strong. Campbell has been called one of the best physical comedians of modern cinema, and he is in full cartoony glory here. Most of the others have a proven track record, or have had an opportunity to shine in some of the other Raimi venues (I can recall being really impressed with Torres as Nebula in a few episodes of Hercules; the woman has some acting chops, I'm telling you). They both play up the trademark anachronism, Jack in the conventional Herc/Xena manner, and Cleo by allowing Cleopatra to claim credit for famous phrases. But the shows don't seem to be working too well, particularly Cleo. Why?
The largest part of the problem is the pacing. Each is only a half hour, but they're trying to pack in an hour's worth of H/X formula, focusing mainly on the fight scenes. Sure, they're fun to watch, but there's very little plot to move them along. Do the math: an hour show has somewhere around 45 minutes or so of actual footage, without commercials, while a half-hour show has around 20 minutes. One of Raimi's formula fight scenes, with gymnastics and such, takes, oh, probably around a full 5 minutes, and there seem to be three of them in an episode, on average. In Xena, that means you've got half an hour to develop the story, explain why Xena's getting into the fights, and show us a facet of her personality. In a half-hour show, it means you've got, like 5 minutes. This doesn't give you much time to figure out who these people are, or to develop a reason to care about what happens to them. In a situation like with Cleo, where you're also trying to describe a future world, it's deadly. Jack doesn't suffer as much from this, in part because they forego some of the fight scenes in favor of Campbell's comedy (an excellent choice, in my opinion). Further, Jack has the advantage of that fabulous New Zealand scenery. The cast of Cleo has only ventured to the surface in two episodes at the time of this writing, with the rest of the time being spent underground. When they're not fighting, they go through broken-down Space 1999 corridors, hang out in a future-glam laboratory or a trashy bar set (used at least twice so far), or, most often, spend their time falling down, down, down the shaft, until they shoot these CGI webs, Spiderman-like, from their forearms, and the momentum they've built up after falling for the past 120 seconds rips their arms from their sockets... no, wait, we're talking Raimi physics, here. They swing safely to a ledge, and get into a fight. I like these shows. I think they'd really come into their own if they each had an hour to do their thing; frankly, that's what I was expecting when I heard they were coming out. But I don't see Cleo holding its audience unless it manages to change. Half-hour comedies work all the time, while half-hour dramas rarely do. If you shoehorn action into the mix, you risk damaging the program further. And the audience is eventually going to want actual explanations of what's going on; they may not be willing to watch long enough to put together the bits and pieces you manage to squeeze in (Harsh Realm, anyone?). Catch these shows, but do it quickly; without intervention, Cleo may not be with us too much longer. Jack, though, will probably pull through just fine. E. Mark "Skippy" Mitchell is a freelance writer of indisputable artistic talent, which explains why he never manages to sell anything. Truly a renaissance man, Skip lives in Chicago, where Chris and Scott take every opportunity to blow him off.
Date: 3/15/2000 Copyright © 2000 by E. Mark Mitchell |
