|
Campion - The Complete First SeasonRating:
Release Date: 13 May, 2003 Retail Price: $79.98 OUR Price: $71.98 You SAVE: $8.00! Cast: |
Campion - The Complete First Season Reviews
Fine Adaptations
Peter Davison is perfectly cast as Margerie Allingham's pixilated sleuth Albert Campion. The Campion books are not detective stories in the same way Agatha Christie's are. The best of them are more adventures than true mysteries. Any faults of the series in that respect are Allingham's, and if your taste is more for mystery than adventure this might not be for you.
But if you admire the best of Allingham's work, the series is letter-perfect. "Look to the Lady", for example, the first of the shows, is, as was the novel, almost pure adventure, with Campion facing down the supernatural as well as a gang of plug-uglies out to pilfer a national treasure.
Allingham's Campion -- a pale young man, tall and thin, with owlish glasses and a vacuous expression -- is a man who lets himself be misunderestimated, and then shows what he's made of. Unlike with Poirot, we never see the working of the little grey cells. The collection of clues come through almost unnoticed. Allingham was not as good a writer as Christie but her books were a lot of fun and so is this series. If you want a show that collects clues like pieces of puzzles, look elsewhere. If you just want to have fun with some cracking good tales, try this out. But don't blame the BBC. These shows are drawn from Allington with slight and defensible changes.
Inexplicably...dullish
We're disappointed in "Campion." I hate to say it, but I have to. We really, really enjoy almost everything detectivewise the BBC has put out, but not so much "Campion." It's just a little too...campy.
Before you "boo and hiss me" with the "NO-this-review-was-not-helpful" button, let me explain. We own both sets of "Campion," first and second season. The first season is definitely better than the second, but we can see why there is no third season.
The direction and the stories themselves are tedious. There are too many inexplicable events ocurring, which are unexplained, making them, well, inexplicable, confusing and dull. However, in the first season, which is why it is slightly better than the second, there seems to be a bit of mysticism woven into the stories to explain the inexplicable, which is sorely lacking in the second season. Furthermore, there are irritatingly expectant and therefore dull recurrences, such as Campion every...single...time setting himself up, with much stupidity, to be attacked and hurt and almost killed by the bad guy, every...single...time. Lugg, his rudish butler, is just way too difficult to hear and understand with his ultra-thick British accent. He's more of an afterthought butler than a genuinely resourceful one.
If you like "Campion," you might also like "The Adela Bradley Mysteries" with Diana Rigg. Both are equally quirky, with weird stories and butler types. But we're not so crazy about either.
Try instead the likes of "Nero Wolfe," "Lord Peter Wimsey," "Sherlock Holmes," "Hercule Poirot," and "Miss Marple."
Now you can hit the "no" button if you still want to.
More Customer Reviews (8 total)
You like Campion - The Complete First Season?
|
