Hybrid wrote:
I liked...
I liked a lot of the ideas behind everything you mentioned, but felt they were just splattered onto the page in whatever cliched form was already to hand.
For example, the autistic kid.
Had he been portrayed as a more typical autistic, rather than the socially retarded savant that everyone else is doing, I might have paid attention.
Indeed, it's become quite the fashion now to have such a character in your TV show. Token black guy, token gay, token atypical female role, token Aspie.
The black guy has to be a Richard Pryor/Eddie Murphy/Will Smith/Chris Rock style comedic focus, the gay has to be a fashion god and camp as fuck, the female is usually a sugar-free, caffeine-free, diet Buffy/Charmed clone that's long past it's sell-by date (because they couldn't graps teh formula for Ripley or Sarah Connor). The Aspie is just lifted off Rain Man, The Good Doctor, Mercury Rising, and all the usual portrayals.
^
This is why I feel it's virtue-signalling. Had they done it well, I'd have applauded instead of just pissing on it and walking away.
Same for the ''mental health' victims - Were they?
They didn't really spend any time developing the characters, or even giving them depth. They were again just cardboard cutout cliches slapped together in whatever set up was juuuuuuuuust enough of a vehicle for the funny line delivery setup.
I get the distinct impression that Shane Black, as he tends to, wrote a lot of great stuff for this film but, as the director of a 20th Century Fox film, was not the one actually calling the shots...