24: Live Another Day

This is a 12-week 24, so loyal fans can expect twice the action in half the time. You won’t want to miss a minute.

It’s a fast-moving trip down memory lane featuring lots of familiar faces, such as computer hacker Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) in full “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” mode, plus some intriguing new villains.

24 is as much a thrill ride as ever.

24, in other words, is still thankfully 24.

No matter what, the show returns with the same sense of modern-day paranoia and urgency that fueled its best seasons, and however over-the-top it goes, its real-world geopolitical concerns are real-world geopolitical concerns.

It may be preposterous. It may lack the political finesse of "The Americans" or "Homeland." But with tight shots of nervous eyes and cinematic displays of Jack's heroics, 24 still excels at high anxiety.

Certainly nostalgia is a factor.... But delight may be a better word. It's always good to see an old friend, and an old pro in action. Live Another Day gives us both.

Live Another Day's drone story extends Bush-era mechanized warfare into the age of Obama. It's another example of 24's knack for mixing left- and right-wing assumptions into a ferocious action film cocktail.... Welcome to one more day.

The show will skip hours here and there, but the "24" clock will continue to run, and if the first two hours are any indication, the time away has been good for the franchise.

Going by the first two hours, this new incarnation of the show exactly as 24-ish as you'd want it to be.

It starts at a dead run and never slackens its pace.

Jack will have his work cut out for him, and audiences will be as enthralled by 24 as they have ever been, if not more, and they'll have good reason.

The reason to watch 24: Live Another Day isn’t for ideology. It’s to get caught up in a fast-paced, high-powered adventure played out by people we care about.

Live Another Day may ultimately set off every clichéd minefield the show tripped over the previous eight seasons, but the time commitment is so much shorter that I can enjoy the show's strengths (Jack, his relationship with Chloe, the action set pieces) without getting too bummed out by its weaknesses if they wind up persisting like always.

Live Another Day starts its 12-episode run in a typically gripping if superficial and improbable fashion, but you'll get no complaints from me.

Fans of 24 are likely to go all in on Live Another Day. But what if you didn’t watch the original? Will you be lost? I’d say maybe, although there are always long stretches of 24 in which everyone is pretty much lost.

It's two hours of all the things you love (or don't) about 24: The twists and turns, the recalcitrant, dimwitted superiors, the nick-of-time escapes and oh-so-close near-captures. And, of course, there's Sutherland and Rajskub, still one of the best teams the spy genre has ever produced.

Jack is back, and he's still a lot of fun. [12 May 2014]

It remains a well-made and potentially addictive drama, whether you watch it in real time or later on your DVR. Time is still on its side.

The revived 24 is still instantly involving and packed with a dizzying rush of suspenseful crescendos. The new Jack, meanwhile, is the same as the old Jack, which is to say he flips the bird in the face of terror and squirms his way out of major messes like a gun-toting Houdini--all while managing to make a man purse look good.

The result is a leaner, scrappier 24 that is both firmly within its comfort zone--the unstoppable Jack, unflinchingly facing interrogators and taking down three guards while handcuffed--and somehow outside it, with Jack and the other returning characters more readily showing the wear and tear of their profession.

There are promising signs of life in the first two hours of the new series, which take place between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. in London.

24: Live Another Day has all the old style and content hallmarks: the crazy, adrenalized action, the hidden-agenda plot twists, and the pounding Wagnerian countdowns to commercials. In fact, this abbreviated 12-episode revival may be an improvement because of the way it galvanizes the pace.

24: Live Another Day does action scenes really well, but the dialogue suffers: It can be overly melodramatic and expository.

The novelty--and thus, a bit of the edge--is gone as Fox's 12-part 24: Live Another Day seeks to prove that less is more, slowly revving up the comfortably formulaic engine while visceral split-screen editing once again intensifies the literally explosive twists. And yet, because a sad, mad, badass Jack Bauer is the only Jack we've ever known, there's something grimly satisfying when he mutters bleakly to one of his few allies, "I don't have any friends."

He anticipates pretty much every move made against him, as you might as well, given that they’re made by people designed to remind you of previous people in Jack’s universe.

24: Live Another Day can and should only be judged on one metric--is it entertaining. And that, happily, is a real no brainer. Of course it’s entertaining.

I sometimes miss the more relatable tones of early 24--the first five seasons were spectacular--and doubt that the show can ever get there again, but the producers have so embraced the larger-than-life elements of their beloved character that it’s hard not to enjoy the show on those terms.

Jack Bauer started this story as a family man trying to get back into his wife’s good graces; now, he’s a grenade with its pin pulled, others diving away from him for cover. Live Another Day is best when it understands that. Pity that it brings everything else about the show along for the ride.

[Director] Cassar juggles plenty of balls in that first hour, uses some new techniques at his disposal and gives Rajskub her best scenes yet. But there’s something very retro about the formula--something that doesn’t quite seem ready for revival.

The story is sweaty with provocative, post--al-Qaeda, post-Snowden security anxieties--drone warfare, abused surveillance, and secrecy--but the treatment so far is superficial and sensationalistic.

Fox made the first two episodes available for review. They’re watchable but also sadly a little comical, with Jack again all clenched up while speaking in a gasping-for-air rasp or silently clenching his jaw.

Yet despite the spiffy new London locale and the four-year hiatus, 24: Live Another Day is--at least in its first two hours--more reminiscent of the run-of-the-mill later seasons as opposed to its revelatory, exhilarating heyday.

Other than the shorter season and London setting, the story beats and types of twists are nearly identical. This sameness highlights how the show's format, revolutionary when it premiered more than a decade ago, has become formulaic and a little stale.

By the second hour (both of Monday’s episodes adhere to the minute-by-minute chronology; the fast-forwarding will happen later), it’s clear that Live Another Day is not much interested in broadening the show’s scope, feeling or characters. It does, however, have an abiding interest in the latest news about spying, vis-a-vis its own version of notorious document-leaker Edward Snowden: Chloe O’Brian.

The opening two episodes are characteristically entertaining, and snap along pretty briskly (the first is in real time), but it’s hard to escape a sense of creative malaise around all this.

In the new miniseries’ opening installments, 24 makes some half-hearted efforts to contend with its own legacy.

The setting, London, is new, but not much else.