Justified Season 4 DVD

13 reviews for Justified Season 4 DVD

1. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Petra Classen – September 18, 2013

   Originally posted on Amazon.com · not a MarioShroomed purchase
2. 

   Rated 4 out of 5

   Alric the Red – January 14, 2014

   Originally posted on Amazon.com · not a MarioShroomed purchase

   Lacked a clear direction, but still topnotch

   Unlike some of the others here, I was a wee-bit disappointed with this season. It lacked two things: a solid story arc; and interactions between Raylan Givens (Timothy Oliphant) and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). But let’s begin with the story arc.

   The opening episode of the fourth season begins with a flashback from thirty years ago. A man’s parachute has malfunctioned and he is splattered on the pavement in a suburban neighborhood. Fade to black and we arrive in modern times. The man who had fallen from the sky had long ago been identified as Drew Thompson. But after a series of events, starting with a teenaged couple breaking into the empty home of Arlo Givens (Raylan’s father, who is now serving time for crimes committed in a previous season). Things begin to unravel, and the real story comes into focus when it’s discovered that the man splattered on the pavement wasn’t Drew Thompson after all, and that Thompson is probably still living in Harlan under an alias. Various characters are looking for Thompson, including Raylan, for their own reasons, but the man who wants him the most is Theo Tonin, a Detroit gangster we’ve met before. He’d been shot in the eye by Thompson. Tonin’s primary desire is to capture Thompson so he can torture him. Various alliances are formed between Tonin’s representatives and the Harlan criminal elements, among whom is Crowder. A race is on to discover which Harlan citizen is actually Drew Thompson, and whoever finds him will reap a benefit from this loyalty to Tonin.

   Of course, there are these other stories mixed in that touch on the main plot device. Raylan tries a couple of times to reconnect with his scheming father while visiting him in prison, to discuss what his connection was to Thompson. After the sad prostitute Ellen May finds Jesus at a tent revival, Winona decides that Ellen has to be killed, to prevent her from confessing to a murder they’d committed in an earlier season. Boyd feels a pinch in his drug distribution as the new preacher gets converts. All of these other stories were interesting in their own separate ways, and, of course, they included all the great dialogue we’ve come to expect. However, after some point, it began to feel somewhat contrived and padded, that the writers were making it up as they went along. This was most evident in the arc dealing with Drew Thompson. When Thompson’s identity is finally revealed, it felt like a rabbit pulled out of the hat. Whatever revelation Raylan received that permitted him to jump to the conclusion of who Thompson was was never clearly stated, and I was unconvinced there was anything that really led him to that conclusion. At that point, I was sure that the writers had concocted it out of thin air. Well, after the last episode, I watched the special features, where the writers flatly admitted that that’s exactly what they had done. They were running out of time, and they simply picked a character with whom we were all already familiar, and then decided that he’s who they’ll tell us was Thompson. I took no pleasure in discovering my instincts were right, because it meant that the writing wasn’t as tight as previous seasons, that the process itself was that obvious to me.

   There were a couple of other scenes, too, that stretched credibility, that made no sense and seemed to be written solely to make things more complicated, just to have SOMETHING happening. Winona (Boyd’s fiance), at a critical juncture of a plan, and for no apparent reason, has her cohort get out of the van, thereby bringing about an outcome that seemed absolutely ridiculous. At another point, Raylan’s ex-wife assists in a shootout, a situation that seemed flat-out silly, a way to make her appear tougher, like a modern-day Calamity Jane, just to raise her profile. Another thing was that Boyd himself came off as less interesting, unable to achieve the level of conniving superiority he normally possesses. For example, a new character, Nicky Augustine (Tonin’s representative in Harlon), gave Boyd a good physical working over, and had taken special delight in insulting Winona. Augustine is a deliciously vile individual, one for whom karma is waiting, and it eventually gets him. However, it doesn’t come the way he deserved it, and Boyd was left looking weak. This reinforced the feeling that the writing was very diffused, with the writers merely churning out pages without thinking whether the outcomes were consistent with the way the characters had been depicted elsewhere. All of these missteps became more glaring in the last two or three episodes, as the the season was running out, and the writers simply didn’t know where to go next. It failed to sweep me up, because the writers themselves weren’t compelled forward by a clear direction, and were instead scrambling to tie up the story.

   As a diehard JUSTIFIED fan, I’m not going to say this isn’t worth your time. It is. There is still a lot of the great quippy dialogue between the good guys and bad guys (or between good guys and not-so-good guys), that made the disappointing denouement of the main story arc more palatable. Some of the best dialogue this season was between Chief Deputy Marshal Art Mullen (Nick Searcy) and Raylan. In fact, just about anything Art said was entertaining. Also, the RV-dwelling Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), who’s managed to survive so many past double-crosses, has become a more likable form of oiliness. And, of course, there’s always Boyd, with his deliberate cadence, who’s always charismatic, despite the creative team’s failure to make him interesting. This season, it was up to Goggins alone to make him interesting. What this season really lacked was more exchanges between Crowder and Raylan. These two always had some sort of twisted kinship, but one that was too full of crossed feelings for either to see the other clearly. In the entire fourth season, there was only one in-depth conversation between them, but it lacked the edginess we’ve come to expect. In fact, it seemed almost formulaic, obligatory.

   As for this BD edition itself, there are a lot of extras. Many of the episodes have commentaries, by directors, writers, and some of the actors. Oliphant and Goggins do one each. One entire episode gets a special treatment, with a nearly scene-by-scene analysis, of why particular things were said or why a scene was covered with a certain camera angle. I am one of those fans who enjoys watching creative people describe their process, and when it’s a favorite show, I love it even more. I prefer watching the series this way, on BD, over streaming, for this very reason, because of the extra features. A great show, all around.

   Overall, despite my misgivings about the main story arc and the unfocused writing, I still have to give it a high score. It should have been better, but it’ll do for now. Hopefully this was just a hiccup. However, I’m worried that, with the demise of Elmore Leonard, the show will continue to devolve in this slapdash manner. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
   ___________________________________________________________________________

3. 

   Rated 2 out of 5

   Fahrenheit 451 – May 8, 2015

   Originally posted on Amazon.com · not a MarioShroomed purchase