Knight Rider
posted in TV Reviews |
OK, so I’ve watched the new 2008 version of Knight Rider. Overall, I liked it. It wasn’t fantastic or anything, but it did a good enough job of reworking the franchise while still tying into the legacy of the story. The actor playing the role of Mike, Justin Bruening, was pretty good in the role. The script pulled off the snarky sarcasm quite well, and he was good at it. The actress playing the daughter of the creator of KITT, Deanna Russo, also did a very nice job. Bruce Davison was a nice bit of casting for the stately man behind the tech. Sydney Tamiia Poitier is an interesting, and fairly successful, bit of casting as the FBI agent. Val Kilmer, who was a last minute replacement for Will Arnett after a dispute amongst the auto manufacturers and their contracts, was naturally great, playing the dead-pan delivery of KITT quite well. And of course, it’s fun to have a brief cameo by Mr. Hasselhoff himself.
The sense of nostalgia for me was the strongest thing going for it. Knight Rider was one of the number of Universal shows from back in the day that I watched heavily as a kid (along with Battlestar Galactica, The A-Team, Simon & Simon, Magnum PI, The Rockford Files, etc). I’ve got all the DVD sets, so I’m clearly one who’d get nostalgic about the new entry to the franchise (this franchise has had new entries in the form of TV movies before). This new entry works well as a backdoor pilot. It updates what needs updating while staying quite true to the original source material. The scripting is a bit obvious, but I wasn’t really expecting the most cutting edge, gripping piece of drama written going into watching it. One criticism that I’ll make without hesitation is in the abysmal music score. Now, I know composer Christopher Tyng is capable of better (his work on comedies like Futurama make that clear), but his work on this show was just plain horrible. Not only is the material excruciatingly overscored (many scenes that shouldn’t have been scored are just non-stop music), most of it is either cheapo-lame “action” material or ripped from an oddly chosen temp source. Either Tyng needs to be jettisoned on any future productions, should it finally be picked up as a series (which seems likely given the good ratings it got), or whatever producer/director responsible for him doing such crap work needs to be dropped.
I still feel that the car is unimpressive (at last the exteriors), feeling more ordinary and lame than the original Trans Am, as sad as that may be. Interiors of the car work well, though. The obviously CGI transformation scenes are adequate, but not awesome (I’ve seen better in commercials). Universal can definitely make this work. They’ve got a good cast and a decent setup to get this thing off the ground. They just need to put a bit more money into the production quality (which wasn’t bad at all, but could use a bit more improvement to be really impressive) and completely rethink their music scoring. Bringing in a writing team that would start to take some chances would be a good move, too. Hopefully Battlestar Galactica has taught the folks at Universal how rolling the dice on risky choices can ultimately pay off big time.
