DVD Review: 24 Season Three
Spoilers within.
What can I say? I'm an absolute mark for the show, so I'm likely to be biased towards it in this review. The one good (or bad) thing about the show is that each season is it's own entity. Sure, there are some recurring characters, and continuity is kept up depending on what happened to a certain character previously, but you don't need to have watched day 1 and day 2 to understand what's happening in day 3... you just have to watch it from the beginning of the season.
The writing in 24 is usually very strong, with many plotlines ripped out of tomorrow's newspapers. There's also a fine balance between talking and action scenes, so the show manages to keep drama buffs, techno geeks, and action dudes happy at the same time. And what can I say about the acting... most of the actors cast into the show, even in small roles, give some of the finest performances of their careers. Forget all the explosions, plot twists, and dead bodies of series regulars every other week, the strong acting is what holds the show together for me.
Enough gushing about the show in general, how does the third season hold up? Pretty good in my eyes... although the creators have set incredibly high standards for themselves after the first two amazing seasons. YOUR federal-agent-in-peril Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is back, and has just spent a year undercover to bring Ramon Salazar (Joaquim de Almeida), a drug lord with some serious terrorist connections, back to the United States in cuffs. The only problem is, in order to get undercover with the Salazar clan, Jack had to start sticking needles in his arm... now he's addicted to heroin, but his new partner Chase (James Badge Dale) is the only one who knows his dirty little secret.
I thought the drug addiction was an innovative and fascinating way to bring a new twist to the already complicated Jack Bauer. For his part, Kiefer plays it very well, going through all the emotions of someone in withdrawl, having vicious stabbing pains, cold sweats, sudden shifts in mood. It would have been great to see this character subplot pan out throughout the entire season, but the writers seem to practically abandon the idea after about ten episodes. Very disappointing... how the hell can you kick a serious drug habit in less than twenty-four hours?
Back to the main plot, a corpse that was infected with the deadly Cordella virus is dumped off at a hospital, bringing Los Angeles' Counter Terrorist Unit into action. Tony Almedia (Carlos Bernard) and his wife Michelle (Reiko Aylesworth) are still at CTU, with a whole new cast of computer nerds and... Kim Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert). Yeah... okay. Well, at least there shouldn't be any wild animals for her to dodge inside a nice, safe building, eh? Somehow, Ramon Salazar is connected to the dumped body... but he's not talking to anyone.
This alone would be enough to kick off a show, but add in to the mix President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), still kicking after the assasination attempt, with a new girlfriend, a new chief of staff, and only hours away from the first national debate as he runs for reelection. While Palmer keeps tabs on how close CTU is to intercepting the virus, he has his own subplot going on. Sometimes this subplot goes off the rails and becomes a little... soap opera-ish... but it's nice to know it's there. The multiple, intricate and interconnecting plots have become a staple of the series, and it's a good thing the spin doctors didn't abandon this formula here.
Spoilers now follow
As individual episodes, I would rank many of them as 10/10's, but as a whole series, they don't always gel together perfectly like they did in previous seasons. For instance, watching certain episodes towards the end of the season (19-24), I can't believe this is supposed to be the same day in these characters' lives! I think the initial twelve episodes were so strong that the writers had dug themselves into a monumental hole and couldn't find their way out of it by the end. I think about the early episodes in the prison and down in Mexico, and then wonder how it's possible the action moved back to Los Angeles so damn quickly.
Some serious beefs: Ramon Salazar is an incredible baddie, and was killed off far too soon. As stated previously, Jack's drug habit is miraculously kicked within a matter of hours, which in the end makes the whole thing seem a little pointless and like a serious wasted opportunity to continue to flex Kiefer's acting muscles. Michelle is somehow transformed from neatly dressed paper pusher to gun-toting, ass kicking field agent in mere moments... wh-wh-wha? Even though Reiko does a good job as a badass, it's still a tough one to swallow. They kill off Ryan Chappelle for absolutely no reason, other than... "oh yeah, look at the time. I think we need to kill off another regular". There's also loads of tiny plot inconsistencies... something that happened two hours ago is completed ignored and forgotten about, etc. It's a relatively minor grievance, which you'd probably only notice if you do dorky things like I do and digest the season in marathon viewings.
BUT! There were plenty of things I really liked about season three: the scenes at the hotel... incredibly scary watching condemned people slowly dying and then watching some of them walk up to take their suicide pills... but very well acted out. The prison break turned out to be perhaps the most exciting episode of the season, and the Russian roulette sequence was also very harrowing. Chase Edmunds... he's kind of like the younger version of Jack. In seasons one and two we got to see Jack have the ever-loving shit kicked out of him... with season three it's Chase's turn to be beaten, shot, tortured, and er... chopped to bits. You gotta love the tough bastard. Stephen Saunders makes a pretty good 'Bond gone bad' for Jack to go up against, although it seems to have been done a million times by now.
The DVD extras are WAY better than season two's extras. There's a commentary track on each disc, and they do a better job actually talking about how the episode was made, how this scene was shot, how this scene was originally written, etc, etc... as opposed to before where you could tell the actors were just watching the episode with you. There's a bunch of deleted scenes, all with optional director commentary. Three featurettes about the making of the series, the season four trailer and a short prequel to season four round out the extras.
I suppose this box would be for fans only. If you're interested in the series, but never seen it before, you may as well start with season one and work your way up. If you're already a fan, you already know 24 is the most pulse-poundingly awesomest kick-assing rock em sock em head banger of a show on television. Buy it now! 8/10.