Prison Break

It’s packed full of great action and enough fun twists and turns to intrigue even those who aren’t totally caught up. Plus, the performances are strong all around, making it easy to get invested in the characters again.

Some of the stuff raises an eyebrow, but, heck, the original was that way, too. That was part of the fun. Prison Break was always a guilty pleasure. It remains so for the second go-round.

The short run makes the new incarnation of Prison Break action-packed, with just enough down time for the characters to ponder what’s happening to them.

Prison Break embraces its ridiculousness, allowing you to check out mentally after a long work day. If that doesn’t sound appealing to you, if you want to break down a show more intellectually, there are plenty of other options.

After a crackling good start, Prison Break begins to wobble but doesn’t quite topple in succeeding hours.

Despite ingredients that probably sound hackneyed and unoriginal, Prison Break eventually does find a little spark in season five.

The four episodes I've seen are action-packed but emotionally unsatisfying, possibly because Michael's motives are so far much less clear.

The prison itself is a dull, unimaginative setting that doesn’t offer much in terms of facilitating a conceptually interesting escape plot full of fresh ideas or interesting complications. This, in turn, diminishes Michael.

Although there's an initial kick as the writers reintroduce the various players -- including the ruthless T-Bag (Robert Knepper) Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and T-Bone (Rockmund Dunbar) -- there's a willy-nilly quality to it all, like a high-school reunion where, after the greetings, there's not very much to say.

The ingredients that fans of the old show are looking for are certainly here: a prison, an escape plan, a slowly emerging conspiracy, old-favorite characters newly imagined. But once the thrill of becoming reacquainted wears off, you’re left with a somewhat muddled, not at all credible yarn.

The show remains crazy in its plotting, but it does move at a quick clip, fast enough that some viewers will forgive it for some obvious twists and turns. ... Other than an effort to goose ratings with the return of a familiar title, is there really any creative reason for more “Prison Break”? Probably not.

It’s puzzling that the return of Prison Break takes so little advantage of all that potential, and offers up a incarceration saga that is by turns mechanical, grim and overly convoluted.

Coherence and a respect for reality, of course, were never Prison's strengths--which makes you wonder whether this is really a show we want muddling around in Yemen, a country suffering from a civil war in which our military has become entangled. Unfortunately, to no great surprise, Prison makes no effort to get the facts or parties straight, or to avoid a single ugly Middle Eastern stereotype.

In its new miniseries incarnation, it wants to be a dumb show, full of clichés, that has something to say, and you’d be surprised how easily that tilts over into outright offensiveness.

A clunker that's slow to build and never believable as it takes shape.

There’s no nuance to their thinking, no unexpected wrench in the gears that they won’t eventually be able to out-maneuver, and this weighs down an already laughably heavy-handed narrative.