DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
 
 
 
COMRADE DETECTIVE
August 4, 2017  | By David Bianculli

Amazon Prime Video, 3:00 a.m. ET

 

SERIES PREMIERE: This is so weird, it’s hard to describe, but here goes. It helps if you’ve been a fan of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, like I have, for decades, because that Sixties Woody Allen film debut establishes a parallel – up to a point. In that film, Allen took an existing action film from the Pacific Rim, and dubbed it with intentionally incongruous and funny dialogue, to turn it into some absurd hunt for a secret recipe. Comrade Detective sort of does the same thing, by taking a Romanian detective movie from the Eighties and dubbing it, with Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt providing the substituting star voices. Once again, the replacement dialogue is played for laughs, with lots of jokes aimed at American capitalism – but the jokes in Comrade Detective don’t end there. Not at all. Because the “original” series isn’t a “found artifact” at all. It’s created especially for this parody, shot on foreign locations, starring Romanian actors, and photographed and edited to either approximate or parody action movies of the Reagan era. Sometimes the stunts are impressively exciting and daring. Other times, not. But as high concepts go, this new TV series couldn’t get much higher. For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.

 
 
 
 
 
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