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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
11
Mixed:
17
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
May 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Although there is a certain karaoke quality to the re-created live performances — Boon is tasked with playing perhaps the most charismatic performer in punk rock, a fool’s errand, as a glimpse of the actual band attests — “Pistol” gets the energy of the music and the crowds, and the look of the kids and the venues, right.
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The IndependentMay 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show’s portrayal of punk rock itself – filtered through the lens of Malcolm’s machinations and even, at times, the vanity of the kids in the band – feels more like an image than a spirit, an escape rather than a way of life. Pistol, unlike the music that inspired it, never grabs you by the throat.
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May 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Thanks to Boyle, the cliched nature of Pistol is disappointing but not crippling. Still, the show seems as overdone as the dinosaur bands the Pistols were rebelling against, with a story that moves at a leisurely pace for five hours. [May 2022, p.78]
May 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
While most of the performances are solid, Boon’s Johnny Rotten alone is reason enough to watch. The dialogue can be clunky, as though lifted from a third-rate Pistols biography or ripped from any other on-screen fictionalization of a famous band’s formation. There’s too much starting of things better left suggested. ... Like too many docudramas, Pistol doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to say, or why.
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May 27, 2022
Season 1 Review:
"Pistol's" most watchable episode is the last, covering the band's first and (effectively) only U.S. tour which crashed and burned after the 1978 concert at San Francisco's Winterland. But what comes before is the humdrum — a whole listless swath that spreads over scenes, characters, and episodes. Hardly anyone catches fire, including Johnny Rotten, although his spiked red hair does do a good impression of shooting flames.
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May 26, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Like the real Pistols, the show is transcendent for a brief time, a raucous coming together of blunt politics and brash style. But over the last four or five episodes, it becomes an obnoxious and repetitive regurgitation. Pistol is, however, ridiculously watchable and easily digestible. Unmistakably the sentimental work of the T2 Trainspotting filmmaker.
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May 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Chronicling the history of a band devoted to chaos and anarchy makes for a messy subject, which might explain why "Pistol" -- a six-part limited series about the rise of the Sex Pistols -- is such a dreary exercise. Director Danny Boyle meticulously replicates the period, but despite plenty of sex, drugs, rock and rage, this Hulu presentation feels more like a coffee-table book than a fully realized drama.
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IndieWireMay 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Whenever Boyle manages to tamp down the faux-provocative visual put-ons and let this group work as a group, that’s when “Pistol” gets closest to capturing the energy it’s striving for. ... For most of the rest of the show, “Pistol” tries too hard to make the case for a band that never really needed any help to make an impression.
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The PlaylistMay 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Hyperactive filmmaking with non-stop edits and showy angles only calls attention to itself and away from the subject. The Pistols themselves get lost in all the chaotic artistic decisions and the show becomes more about the image of the band than the people, the message, or even the music.
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The TelegraphMay 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Constantly hard-cutting between judiciously chosen documentary news footage with snatches of Seventies pop-culture musical and film references and a punchily scripted melodrama presented with a luridly overloaded sense of production period detail, Boyle somehow achieves the opposite of authenticity, winding up with something comically ludicrous that keeps drawing attention to its own artifice.
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