jessegreathouse

Lacks the cinematic polish that we have come to expect from this league of streaming television. The show has great potential and some great on-screen talent but is held back by some weak links on screen, storytelling that lacks compelling reasons to keep watching, and fake backdrops and some poor VFX. It’s not rising to meet the challenge of its contemporaries like House of the Dragon on Max and The Rings of Power on Amazon Video. It’s not a compelling reason to subscribe to Peacock.

I wanted to wait until the end of the season to give my review but at this point I don’t think I will watch the rest. It’s just not up to the standard that we should expect from Disney and the premium subscription to D+. The storytelling is ham fisted. The edits and reshoots have clearly mangled the cohesiveness of the storytelling, which is scary when you start to wonder why it was so bad it needed to get this much change post production. Some of the acting is good, other parts are pretty cringy. The sets and costumes are hit and miss. The action is sometimes great, other times purposely obscured by dark lighting and obstructed framing. The cast is bloated with characters that dont need to exist. I was excited to see Carrie Anne Moss but she was gone after the first 3 minutes. I’m done. If this was a free streaming show by an unknown film studio, I’d be more impressed but Disney should be more careful with Star Wars and its audience. This clumsiness is unacceptable.

The fascination with having the lead actor wear facial prosthetics, to look more closely like the real individual whom the story is based on, does not actually serve the story. It’s distracting. It doesn’t look real. It comes off as unnatural, and it’s completely unnecessary. Furthermore, if the producers and director would put as much effort into making sure the characters behaved like real humans do, as they do fixated on making Sofia Vergara’s face, then this would have been a much better show. As it stands, it’s very difficult to suspend my disbelief, that this is based on a true story, when these characters do not behave like real people. Griselda plays like it was written by a person who saw Scarface once, and they could write a Latin crime drama. The scenes don’t offer any sense of realism at all. It’s not possible for a human to stab a machete through a human skull. It’s not possible for a man to get shot in the chest 5 times and continue to swing a machete. That’s not how any of this works. The character dialogue is way too hammy, and makes these people feel like stereotypes of Latin people, instead of real people. The show had sections of Latin dialogue interspersed with English, which is fine. But the English subtitles are not translated correctly in some circumstances. There is a surprising censorship of the slang word “puta” which is usually translated as “****” or b****, but this word is completely skipped over in translation every time even though we can clearly hear what they’re actually saying. This is a really bizarre example of censorship for no good reason. We’re allowed to witness all this excessive violence, and hear cursing in Spanish, but we are not allowed to read the translations of the naughty words in English? Get real.

I really wanted to enjoy this show but the Audio engineering made it unwatchable for me. It sounds like it was recorded and mixed by an amateur. I've seen tik-tok videos with better audio engineering. Some parts are alright, but it keeps going into other sequences where the dialogue is too difficult to understand, especially when they play music over it. It's not well thought out and produced with regard to how the audio was captured and engineered.