NETFLIX ALMOST HAS A HIT WITH "THE DIPLOMAT"

🎥🎞️Series Review🎞️🎥 - THE DIPLOMAT [2023] - R - NETFLIX - Created by Deborah Cahn. It premiered on the Netflix streaming service in April of 2023. Produced by Janice Williams, Kerri Russell, and Simon Cellan Jones. This dramatic series stars Kerri Russell, Rufus Sewell, David Gyasi, Ali Ahn, Rory Kinnear, and Ato Essandoh.

After a British naval aircraft carrier is attacked and left crippled in a sea location near the middle east, a clever U.S. intelligence agent [Russell] is appointed as the new United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. She helps defuse an international crisis between three dark countries, forges strategic alliances and adjusts to her new place in a political atmosphere that is both stressful and intense, something she did not want to handle in her life in the first place. She tries to manage a deteriorating marriage with her husband [Sewell] who has a hard time watching his wife succeed only because of a president that has a political agenda.

THE GOOD - The series provides an inside look at the political landscape after a crippling terrorist attack that brings the powerhouses of the United States and the United Kingdom to try and investigate who instigated the attack. There are some dramatic political stances and some silliness that occurs in-between some important meetings. There's standard pacing and direction that catches the performances of the actors without cameras that constantly shake or pan around the actors.

THE BAD - Through everything that is happening in the plot, somehow the writers added a romantic turn in the series where the leading actor & married wife [Russell] is blessed by her husband [Sewell] to have an affair with a British Foreign Secretary [Gyasi], who just happens to be a black man. I lost count about how many times [Russell] has to say, "my marriage is at an end..." to try and justify her having a possible affair. There are also other mixed couples having affairs in the Embassy where the Diplomat operates. There is no action in this series, there is also no real fear of the consequences of any decisions that are being made that could bring three nuclear powered countries into global nuclear war.

POST MORTEM - Essentially, the writer has created a series where a married couple opens the door towards that of a Cuck Hold relationship; where one member of the marriage agrees [or approves] of another to have an open affair in the presence of another. You can feel in the series that Russell is just aching to have a sex scene with a black man and how the series is setting the whole thing up for a BIG presentation. Other than that, there is nothing awesome about this series and if the romances and affairs were cut out of the show, it might speed things along and could make this series epic. I am sure that Netflix is testing this series format to  eventually create future series concerning Cuck Holds and how normal it is to have Caucasians share sex with black men.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ [3 of 5 Stars]

CONTINUUM [I'll Follow You Down] CRUSHES A FANTASTIC PLOT WITH A WEAK ENDING

🎥🎞MOVIE REVIEW🎞🎥 - CONTINUUM - [PG-13] -Peacock -  This nice little gem from 2013 fell under my scope of reviews shortly after I was doing a copyright search for stories that involved Quantum Time Traveling plots and short stories. The film stars John Paul Rutman, Rufus Sewell, and Gillian Anderson. This film can be found on Peacock under "I'LL FOLLOW YOU DOWN."

The plot is simple but very mysterious, a loving and well respected father is dropped off at an airport by his wife [Anderson] and young son. In previous scenes, the young boy is proven to be pretty intelligent far beyond his years. But the father [Sewell] boards a plane and never returns home. Th son's mother is horribly worried and her love for her husband is without question, but questions arise after his arrival to the city of destination; he's never checked out of his room, his wallet, cell phone, and other items left behind, and the husband has just disappeared. The father has disappeared like a whisper in the wind and his young son has to struggle through life with a damaged mother and a childhood sweetheart who will eventually become his wife.

Years pass and the young boy grows up questioning important decisions in his life, due to the mysterious loss of his father. Rutman - the once little kid also known from the brilliant movie, SIX SENSE - has a love interest that is constantly being put on hold due to his mother [Anderson] still grieving over the disappearance of his father. Eventually the story passes onto the boys grandfather, played by Victor Garber, who tells the young son that his father had stepped through a worm hole and traveled into the past. There are very few details about how the father was able to create the worm hole, but only that he sustained a power source to get him there.

Everything up to this point in the film is pretty believable an understandable. The second half of the story follows a rushed script with no subtle delivery on how the jump in time would be  a mind blowing experience. The film turns to a flashback of the father [Sewell] stepping into a time machine and vanishing in a brilliant flash. From there, the son had also made the trip back in time and confronts his father, eventually forcing to return home and save his wife, plus the spirit of the little boy who was lost without any answers to the big question; "What happened to my daddy?" - But there was no emotion in the delivery of the main story here. The director decided to have Rutman play an angry and determined boy who didn't care about the wonders of time travel, who just wanted his father to come home and put his family back to normal.

In my opinion, the writers lost faith in their script and the screenplay. There was no real character development of any of the characters, save the young boy who was now in love with a childhood sweetheart, both trying to live a life of being parents. The son missed a lot of school, but was too smart for college and apparently progressed though school only by "passing all of the tests." 

The script should have spent more time with the father's ignorance to his families needs and furthermore delivered him showing his son the importance of time travel and how they could witness importance events in history. Instead, the movie delivers a crippling blow to the film by making the son too smart for his own good and taking drastic actions to force his father to go back home and save his family.

What bugged me the most about the time traveling, was there was no real attempt to show details of the 1940s, save a change in clothes, some women walking around, introducing an old restaurant with a guy who wore paper hat and served coffee. There also wasn't a memorable scene in the film that made me want to remember this dud of a production. Rutman tried to be a leader in this film, but the lack of solid character development made him all of the other cast members seem like they were just going through the motions to finish this film.

⭐️⭐️💫 [2.5 of 5 Stars]