TV Review: Crisis “We Were Supposed to Help Each Other”
By: Brandon Wolfe
‘Crisis’ continues to be a complete failure at everything it attempts to do. It’s a thriller that isn’t thrilling, involving characters we do not care about in a story that doesn’t seem worth the telling. The show moves with a constant urgency that exists only onscreen, not in the viewer. It’s biting its own nails while we at home are stifling yawns.
Kidnapping ringmaster Francis Gibson is using more powerful parents as tools to do his bidding. This week, he’s enlisted Congressman Langston Wirth, his wife Marie, and Senator Mason Yarrow in a plan to wrest information from the CIA headquarters in Langley in exchange for their children’s freedom. Using their high-level government access, the parents are able to get their hands on a highly classified flash drive from within the CIA vault and, using the threat of a phony bomb vest, get it outside to be transmitted via cell phone, a process that costs the congressman his life, but does see the Wirth and Yarrow children set free as promised. The information transmitted shows footage of a military operation gone horribly wrong, the mission that cost Gibson his professional career and thus prompted this entire revenge scheme.
FBI agent Susie Dunn has a private conversation with her sister, CEO Meg Fitch, about her interactions thus far with the kidnappers, actions that Dunn believes Fitch isn’t being entirely forthcoming about. Fitch chooses to use her leverage with the White House to go over the FBI’s head and conduct her own investigation into the kidnapping using her corporation’s considerable resources. In the process of this, she finds a lead in the form of a man with whom she once had an affair. None of this story thread is shaping up to be any more intriguing than anything else the show has been giving us, but Gillian Anderson’s icy professionalism as Fitch remains the only performance thus far worth noting. It’s far from the best work she’s done, but Anderson is good enough to elevate even this material to a level where it could at least seem vaguely compelling, if you squint.
Meanwhile at the compound, the children are given the task of boxing up a large stack of money concealed in coffee grounds. We are not given much indication for the nature of the money, beyond the fact that the coffee is likely a deterrent against detection by police dogs. When one student attempts to write an SOS message on one stack of bills, a henchman hits him with the butt of his rifle, triggering a debilitating medical emergency that leaves the hostage unconscious, which Gibson, to his credit, is chagrined about.
The scenes at the compound are perhaps the best, or at least most consistent, indicator of ‘Crisis’s’ amateurishness. The actors playing the young hostages are not very good, and the series clearly does not really know what to do with these characters because it’s already trotting out truly eye-rolling developments, in the form of a love triangle for Amber Fitch, the daughter of Meg (technically the secret daughter of Agent Dunn, because the show thinks that’s more interesting somehow), while Gibson’s daughter, Beth, is handed a cutting habit and her own love interest. These kids are in a tense life-or-death situation, so why is the show making like it’s ‘Degrassi’ with assault rifles? What’s more, the actors playing the henchmen (clad in Michael Myers-esque face masks) are given atrocious dialogue delivered barely competently. Even in a show so utterly ineffective, this entire leg of the story stands out as particularly amateur-hour.
I don’t know what to suggest to save ‘Crisis’ at this point. Its clear inspiration, ‘24’, made a lot of similar transgressions, but it always could rely on the pitbull intensity of Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer to carry it through it all. ‘Crisis’ has Dunn and Secret Service agent Finley as its leads, and neither character registers as anything more than an attractively-shaped cardboard cutout. The show comes back, week after week, to the same question: What would a parent do to save their kids? This is, I suppose, a potentially interesting aspect to examine, but since every parent on this show does the same thing each time (that is, precisely whatever the kidnappers ask of them, regardless of the cost), it grows less interesting with each instance. I just keep waiting for ‘Crisis’ to pull something out of its hat that truly grabs me in some way, any way, but the show seems content to coast on stock thriller tropes for the time being.
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