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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
144
Mixed:
19
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Season 4 Review:
This should be solid, action-packed stuff. Where it flattens out is that with Bauer involved -- and even if CTU wants nothing to do with him, he's going to put himself in the middle of all of this -- you know things are going to work out and too often you know how they'll work out. It takes nearly all of the tension away from a series that trades on suspense. [7 Jan 2005]
Season 2 Review:
The sometimes laughable soap opera aspects of the first year have been minimized. The pulse-racing, adrenaline-fueled suspense has been ratcheted up. If anything, this white-knuckle joy ride now moves faster than the clock that ticks steadily through each episode. [28 Oct 2002]
Season 2 Review:
It brings with it last season's same gift for immediately innards-knotting suspense, fate-of-the-free-world plotting and page-turning viewing, if such a metaphor can be mixed. It also hits the implausibility buttons much earlier in its run, although part of '24's' genius is that it drives so relentlessly forward that it leaves no time for contemplation. [29 Oct 2002]
Season 4 Review:
As '24' quickly revs up the anxiety and action on the new season, the show is still flashing its taut, characteristic strengths: distinctive real time storytelling, tighten-the-vise tension, compelling split-screen visuals and sudden, sometimes shocking, outbursts of violence. All of it pushed at a dazzling pace and built around Sutherland's grim, courageous antihero with the hair-trigger volatility. [7 Jan 2005]
Season 3 Review:
This is now the problem with '24': The first season was a giddy novelty; the second season was a guaranteed tune-in to see if the producers could pull off the same trick twice. But now we know the rhythm of the series, and so its anything-can-happen energy has dissipated into a how-can-we-bring-back-fan-favorites waiting game.
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Season 2 Review:
Really, my only significant complaint about the new '24' is an excessive use of its visual trademark: split-screen images. These are fine when they're used to let you know where major characters are in different subplots simultaneously, but in next week's episode, there's a split-screen shot that separates two characters talking in the same room together!
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Season 1 Review:
Although its style is novel, 24 hews to traditional crime-story conventions; you could plop this plot into a two-hour TV movie and be done with it. The advantage of the real-time hour becomes apparent, however, in the depth of characterization achieved by stretching things out.
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Season 1 Review:
What makes '24' so nail-biting good is its use of layered
storytelling, plot twists and visual trickery to create the illusion
of action. The premiere starts slowly, then picks up steam as it
darts deftly in and out of six different stories. ... The genius of
'24' is that it makes each minute feel more precious than the last. [4 Nov 2001]
Season 6 Review:
Where does that leave Season 6, then, when the show has stemmed major disasters for five years running and its intensity level of choice is 11? As well-oiled as before, actually, and, judging from the four hours airing over Sunday and Monday, unafraid of edging its parallel-universe America ever closer toward a world war nightmare of mass hysteria.
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Season 7 Review:
Treachery and action still abound on 24--its brand is crisis, after all--but the nail-biting, espionage-like first four hours erect a scenario that promises a recharged season built on smarter suspense gambits than the tiresome 24 (and, by extension, Bushian) tropes of outlandish risk, torture and Armageddon-mongering.
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Season 7 Review:
All the new characters are wonderfully drawn, including FBI agent Walker (Annie Wersching); bad, bad guy Jonas Hodges (Jon Voight); a new Chloe-type nerd (Janeane Garofalo). Especially good are Jones and her husband (Colm Feore), who is more consumed with solving his son's death than in being First Man. Whew! Thank God there is Jack Bauer--unchanging, unflinching.
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Season 7 Review:
The new season has a few moments, mostly involving the return from the dead of Jack's old CTU colleague Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who now seems to be working for the bad guys. But all the attempts by Jack and his writers to justify every past decision often brings the action to a crawl.
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Season 8 Review:
By the third episode, though, we've gone off the rails with another low-level blackmailer somehow getting over on an employee at the supposedly powerful and secretive CTU, and with Jack getting caught up in a plot-delaying detour that's even dumber than the survivalist who held Kim hostage for a few episodes in season two.
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Season 3 Review:
This is just an action fairy tale, a modern Saturday afternoon serial or contemporary penny dreadful, designed to keep us hanging on its every outlandish turn by exasperating us, if necessary, with characters we love to hate and contrivances we delight in dissing. ... It's insulting to our intelligence. And we can't stop watching. [28 Oct 2003]
Season 2 Review:
24 strains credulity here and there... and some of the season premiere's doomsday dialogue smacks of parody. But the real-time format builds tension week-to-week as well as scene-to-scene, and Sutherland keeps adding depth to his portrayal of a man staggering slightly with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
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