★½
“Too many episodes, spoil the broth.”
This has something of an interesting history. It was originally 35 episodes of a short-form web series, shown on Hulu, beginning back in 2007, at the time when they were just starting out. That may seem like a lot of content, but each episode was only three to five minutes long. So what you have here is a compilation of all those episodes into a single movie, running about two hours. And… unfortunately, the result is a complete mess, bouncing around in time without rhyme, reason or purpose. It spends too much time on things which don’t matter much, like silly college shenanigans, while galloping past – if addressing at all – matters which feel more important to the plot.
From what I could figure out (and I can by no means swear to any of this), the basic plot involves Natalie Cross (Raitano). She was brought up by her single father (Tompkins), who was a special forces operative. Or maybe black ops. It’s all very murky. As a result, she basically got Hanna‘d, learning all the skills necessary to follow in her father’s footsteps. Initially, she tries to be her own person, but while at college was recruited to work for a BLOC: a black ops corporation, private military who handle jobs governments want done with clean hands. After quitting, Nate found herself in prison, but is now back on the outside, having been promised freedom if she completes ten assignments.
That would be fine. Except, for whatever reason, the show spends far too much time and effort with college-aged Nate (Matula), which is very much the least interesting thing the show has to offer. Except possibly her “Gother than thou” room-mate, Rhonda, who naturally is the person to show the sheltered Nate the ways of the world. Well, the ones that don’t involve hunting and skinning deer, anyway. But who cares? If I wanted to watch that kind of thing, I would… Well, I guess I would watch that kind of thing. You get the idea. The series only achieves energy after Nate goes to work full-time for her BLOC, and is given a little apprentice, Bunny (a nice nod back to Nate’s childhood pet).
I get that the show was made in bite-sized episodes, and it might have worked better in that format. Or, alternatively, if they had shuffled them around for this feature version, into something closer to chronological order. Instead, the results here resemble somebody having fed the footage through a shredder, and then arbitrarily assembled it back together. It means on occasion, you’ll have adjacent scenes taking place decades apart, and on different continents. There was a time, fifteen or more years ago, when this kind of thing was seen as the future of entertainment on the Internet. The failure of things like Quibi proved otherwise. Based on the evidence here, it’s a mercy that never came to pass.
Dir: Blake Calhoun
Star: Natalie Raitano, Sheree J. Wilson, Kim Matula, Matthew Tompkins