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Touching Evil 1 |
List Price: $39.95
Your Price: $35.96 |
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
This three-tape set captures a police force totally unlike the ones U.S. television and film audiences regularly see. Gone are the gunshots and widespread violence that afflict characters on NYPD Blue and Homicide. This dark British miniseries has an unflinching focus on the pensive, slightly spooked but always confident Detective Inspector Dave Creegan (Robson Green). Of course the caseload isn't entirely alien to a pop culture audience, weaned as it is on crime novels and American television-style plots. There's an aging geneticist who is possessed by an odd infatuation--apparently not a sexual one--with children, keeping them penned in an all-white room while watching them on a remote video cam, and other deviants just interesting enough to capture extended interest. Touching Evil's pacing is intricately slow, such that evidence gathering can be seen from an inchworm-like perspective (showing tweezers extracting a single hair, for example). Green's role is structured like Fox Mulder and other U.S. television creations. Moody and a bit inscrutable, Creegan comes to the Organized and Serial Crime Unit after a long sabbatical, triggered (no pun, really!) by his getting shot in the head. Rather than give up police work after meeting with the bullet, however, he recommits to the job, treating cases as if they're his personal obsession. And they are. Creegan violates all the conventions his American TV-cop counterparts break in their unbridled passion to solve crimes, but he does it with unforced and unhurried relish. The plots in each of these episodes are singular, allowing the story lines to develop like good mysteries, even driving the viewer to suspect that Creegan's passions are leading him waywardly away from the cases. Shot with mostly stoic camera angles, the show's energy changes significantly when Creegan's heart begins to pound, the camera catches in halted visuals, and the drama builds and builds until, well, until it avoids resolution time and again, much to the viewer's delight. --Andrew Bartlett
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