Reprisal

As “Reprisal” hurtled toward its end, I was legitimately uncertain as to who would live and who would die. It’s also rare for a show like this to work both in its large and small beats.

If only the narrative were up to the task of meeting the show’s witty and elastic visuals. Strip away the window dressing, and there’s not a lot of heart or complexity to Reprisal’s attempt to turn the wronged-woman trope into a broader universe capable of sustaining itself for multiple seasons. ... Still, it’s engaging in a pulpy, soapy way, fun despite its messy structure and slippery consistency.

If you like the combination of violent action, sentimental fantasy, literary pretension and periodic slapstick humor that “Reprisal” offers, you may enjoy it well enough. Or you may wish you were watching something with the energy of “Banshee,” the clammy atmosphere of “Quarry” or the charm of “Hap and Leonard.”

Reprisal would be a lot of fun if it were 100 minutes long. Unfortunately, it's 10 episodes, some of which are fully an hour long. Reprisal suffers from the same problem so many shows in the Peak TV era do: Not enough story to justify the runtime.

Through seven episodes of its 10-episode first season, Reprisal is a fascinating and audacious series, absolutely a work of some vision. It's also questionably paced, only sporadically involving and, as interesting as its women are, its male characters are a bland and interchangeable blob of facial hair and tattoos and, in that capacity, steal the spotlight all too frequently.

The publicists for Hulu's new revenge drama Reprisal's describe it as "hyper-noir." Actually, it's more an object lesson in how those two terms can't be used together. Film noir is darkly underlit, a creature of the shadows. Its dialogue is cynical but clever. Though its sexuality may be frenzied, it's about seduction, not rape. "Hyper" implies the opposite: Garish. Extreme. Grating. Which is actually a fairly good description of Reprisal. Throw in "charmless" and "crude" and you've pretty much painted the whole picture.

Aims at a clever pitch-darkness. It more often lands on a sort of congenital sourness, one that grows choking at the series’s hour-long episode lengths. It’s an unfortunate miss for series star Abigail Spencer, an appealing performer who deserves a showcase that presses her in service of fewer neonoir clichés.

A fun mix of Sons of Anarchy and your classic femme fatale revenge plot. I had this on for background noise and ended up binge-ing the first season over the weekend. While the main character's development is interesting and gripping, there are a few supporting roles that lack the same depth. The gang that was focused on through the season had many promising characters that were simply glossed over or never developed past their initial introduction. Unfortunately the season as a whole suffered from a broken narrative, and several sloppy cliches (the biggest of which being the overused "girl power" theme - I don't mind it here and there but it's entirely overdone these days) and the gangs as a whole lack depth. Some truly killer performances from both the female leads, and a few of the supporting actresses. Matty and Ethan are also rewarding characters, so the show does have a few good-great efforts through the first season. Overall, a lot to be improved upon. Pacing and characterization being the two most critical points of failure for me. Despite that, very enjoyable and worth a watch. It's nice to see Hulu gradually increasing the quality of their exclusive content. 7/10

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]