Jack’s back! Fox offers up the seventh season of their perennial favorite ‘24’ on Blu-ray soon after the season ended its run in mid-May. Oddly, this is the first I’ve seen of ‘24’ so while I may be out of the loop on some context, I got the gist of the show pretty quick – entertaining, fast-paced fluff.
I’m generally not a fan of dramatic television in general, I’m just more of a film guy as films can encapsulate whole stories in a few hours rather than spread them out over the course of years where there are invariably hours of filler i.e. hours of my life I’ll never get back. If a film bites, I’ve just lost a couple hours, if a TV series craps out at the end, I’ve literally lost full days of my life...and I like my life.
What ‘24’ seems to be good at is fooling you into thinking you’re not wasting hours of your life on inconsequential storylines by keeping the tension high through strategically-planned ‘cliffhanger’ endings and an overstuffed façade of self-importance. The subject matter is, after all, dealing with terrorists and the safety of American lives.
Apparently, the sixth season left a lot to be desired for the ‘24’ faithful, but Fox got the wise idea to preempt the seventh season with the TV movie ‘Redemption’ (sold separately and available since last December) to bridge a gap between the sixth and seventh season and lure peeps back in.
The pic finds Jack (Sutherland) in Africa seeking a little peace but instead gets drawn into a revolution in Sangala involving a sinister dictator Juma (Tony Todd).
The seventh season starts with Jack being subpoenaed on charges involving supposed involvement with shady methods of interrogation and torture but before things can get too ugly for Jack, the FBI rushes in to recruit him. It appears a past acquaintance of Jack is back which means only one person can swoop in and save the day!
So we meet up again with Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), once thought dead from past seasons, but if we learn anything from scripted dramatic television, no dead people are safe from being plucked from their graves for the good/contrivances of the show. His return seems explained well enough I suppose although I’m not quite sure of all the elements surrounding his death. So Jack is brought in to see what Tony’s been up to.
This is where some of the mystery comes in but it seems Tony is working undercover to get closer to the aforementioned Juma through his #1, Dubaku whom have gathered a powerful CIP device that can get around U.S. gov. firewalls.
With this in their hands, Dubaku launches a few threat attacks to get the president to withdraw troops from Sangala so the major story thread involves Jack finding Tony and taking care of the threat while also negotiating traitor agents and bio-weapons being smuggled into America.
As I’m sure everyone is aware, the fun and admittedly ludicrous concept of ‘24’ is that one episode is essentially more or less an hour in the day of Jack and so the series unfolds in (extremely exaggerated) real-time which both pumps up the tension but reeks of a gimmick.
Sutherland certainly is the anchor to the show and almost effortlessly carries the show along but most of the cast didn’t really stick out to me aside from a few (Jon Voight, Janeane Garofalo).
The episodes are presented with a 1080p 1.78:1 transfer that looks great for television. Technically, and while I won’t be confusing it for a big-budget Hollywood film anytime soon, I was pleasantly surprised at the productions values on display although if you live in L.A., expect be taken out of the show every so often when you spot a location that’s just down the street that’s supposed to be in D.C. The English 5.1 DTS-HD is similarly good.
Special Features include commentaries for most of the episodes with a varying group of mostly producers. Some featurettes ‘The Music of 24’, ‘The Ambush’, about half an hour of ‘Deleted Scenes’ and ‘The Untold Story’ which looks at how the WGA strike impacted the show’s production.
Judging by this season alone, it’s a fun ride with fine production values, competent writing and all held together by Sutherland’s strong central performance yet it still didn’t really make me want to seek out past seasons nor do I think I’ll ever return to this season.
If you’re a television junkie, I kind of see how you would want to rent your way through the series to check it out once but to own? I’m not so sure. Regardless, for fans, you won’t get much better than this Blu-ray package.
24: Season Seven [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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