

- #Alex rider point blanc movie#
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#Alex rider point blanc series#
The creepy institutional grime of Point Blanc is a good piece of production design and the series navigates around contemporary London with a fine sense of place.
#Alex rider point blanc movie#
The stunts are minimal, the high-tech gizmos sparse - the movie was giddy about its stunts and gewgaws - and the effects kept to a minimum, but Alex Rider feels more limited than cheap. Only in the seventh and eighth episodes does Alex Rider become exciting, with one very fun snowboarding sequence and a twisty finale that effectively kept me guessing. It also may keep you from realizing that especially in those first five hours, the suspense is limited and the action set pieces are close to non-existent.
#Alex rider point blanc full#
It isn’t like the early episodes are exactly tedious - just that every time you think you’ve figured out how the pieces are aligned, Burt picks them up, starts over again and even, in each situation, has to introduce a full cast of supporting players whom you could easily convince yourself you were supposed to invest in.Ī lot of the 21st-century geopolitical subtext and British colonialist undertones, lifted from the Ian Fleming James Bond books that mark the obvious inspiration, have been stripped away, but the storytelling stops and starts distract from how little Alex Rider has to say about literally anything. That means that the actual seasonal plot of Alex Rider doesn’t really kick in until the fifth episode. The fourth episode is all about introducing Point Blanc and its students and teachers. The third episode is about positioning and preparing Alex for being a spy and getting into Point Blanc. The first two episodes are almost all introducing Alex and his background.
#Alex rider point blanc tv#
He has, however, kept the TV show as an origin story and, as a result, Alex Rider spends a lot of time establishing its premise, establishing its premise and establishing its premise again. Since Stormbreaker was the first book in Horowitz’s series - 13 tomes and counting - writer Guy Burt ( The Bletchley Circle) has skipped ahead to the second novel, fittingly titled Point Blanc.

Judge Judy Sheindlin Lands New Court Show on Amazon's IMDb TV But guess what? Point Blanc is harboring some dark secrets and although getting into the school might be reasonably simple, getting out surely will not be. Nestled in the remote reaches of the French Alps, Point Blanc takes the troubled spawn of the wealthy elite and trains them into becoming responsible members of society. Alex meets the head of the DSO (Stephen Dillane’s Alan Blunt) under tragic circumstances, and he’s soon enlisted into the family business because the DSO needs somebody capable of infiltrating a mysterious school called Point Blanc. Plus, maybe if people tune in for this launch, somebody will see fit to give the budget a necessary boost.įor those who don’t know, Alex Rider (Otto Farrant) is a normal London teen, bored by his banker uncle Ian (Andrew Buchan) and attentive housekeeper Jack (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), but content to hang out with geeky buddy Tom (Brenock O’Connor), holding movie nights and sneaking out to parties.Īlex thinks his uncle is beyond dull even though Ian has taken him on trips around the globe, helped him get training in Krav Maga and taught him a strange assortment of skills that make sense when he discovers that Uncle Ian is part of an intelligence operation called Department of Special Operations. But it feels like a reasonable eight-episode set-up for a fun series. And as for the series itself? It’s fine! The decision was made to double down on exposition for this reintroduction to Alex Rider and his undercover world, which leads to long stretches of narrative clunkiness. The new TV series bearing the teenage spy’s name premieres on Friday on Amazon’s IMDb TV platform and it has already been renewed for a second season, meaning that audiences can feel some liberty to get invested. Welcome to the streaming revolution, Alex Rider.

The feature adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s well-liked espionage saga failed to make back even a modest budget and earned reviews that, at best, called the star-studded - Ewan McGregor! Damian Lewis! Alicia Silverstone! Mickey Rourke! Bill Nighy! - movie “forgettable.” By almost any standard, 2006’s Stormbreaker (or Alex Rider: Stormbreaker in the United States) was a disaster.
