Way back in October 2016 I watched the first season of Amazon's Goliath with Billy Bob Thornton as a former lawyer who's brought out of his drunken stupor to fight against the big law firm he helped found. I really liked that first season and as I said it was the legal thriller I had hoped Better Call Saul would be.
Now almost 18 months later we finally get a second season and it's much more like how Better Call Saul actually turned out to be. Which is to say, shitty with extraneous medical conditions and drug cartels. Overall it's a jumbled mess that almost completely leaves out the courtroom.
Having won the big case last season, Billy is rich. He buys a Prius he doesn't use and a house for his daughter but he still works out of and usually sleeps at the crappy motel from the first season. A bus"boy" at the bar he frequents has two sons who are in a gang and are killed by the DEA or something. Then his good 15-year-old son is charged with murdering someone in retaliation. The father asks Billy to take the case, but he doesn't until the father is murdered on his way to give testimony.
So now you think this season is about getting this kid off the murder charge, right? But not really. That all goes out the window when Billy contacts an FBI friend and they pressure a dirty cop into confessing that his informant killed...whoever it was.
At that point it becomes a long, boring mess of the bad guys covering their tracks. There's a drug kingpin in Mexico who cuts people up for fun, his sister who is running for mayor in LA, and a real estate developer who are all working together for their various reasons. The mayoral candidate, Marisol, hooks up with Billy and takes him to Mexico, where he's taken hostage by four almost random characters until he escapes.
The real estate guy Tom (played by Mark Duplass of the indie filmmaking duo The Duplass Brothers) is especially weird. When he was 9 his sister lost her leg and somehow this gave him his first erection and so he's been obsessed with it ever since. He actually has a mock-up of his old house with actors to recreate the scene while he beats off. It is super creepy. And totally pointless. I mean, what the hell does that add to the plot? Nothing. He hooks up with Billy's assistant, a former hooker, which also doesn't really add a whole lot. He gets a little bit of information that he could have gotten if he'd used some goon to plant a bug or listened in on Billy's cell phone.
There's also a henchman who could be in a James Bond movie. He has only one hand and on the other arm he has a super-powered vise thing that at one point he uses to crush a woman's nose and another to choke someone. I forget if he has a name or not.
For a show that's supposed to be a legal thriller there's very little courtroom action. The murder case never even goes to jury selection. Not that I necessarily want courtroom action as we've seen that plenty, but when your character is a lawyer and does almost no lawyering, it seems like a problem. As I said most of the last 4 episodes are the bad guys covering their tracks. They kinda suck at it. I mean Billy goes to the drug kingpin's estate in Mexico so you think it'd be pretty easy to kill him and leave him in a shallow grave, but they don't do that. Instead he wanders off and ends up being taken hostage before escaping. Is it really that hard to kill someone in rural Mexico when you have an army of machine gun-toting goons at your beck and call? It really shouldn't be.
It doesn't really make sense the DEA raid that kicks off the season. I assume it's where the busboy's older sons are killed, but then who would the younger son be killing? And why? And since he was a poster child of the mayoral candidate, why did they use him as the fall guy? All it did was make things more difficult for her campaign. Since there's never a trial or anything we never really get into all the mechanics of that so it just winds up being pretty pointless. Really the whole season is pretty pointless.
And in the end evil prevails! At least the mayoral candidate gets elected mayor and her brother is still a big drug kingpin. The real estate guy gets all his limbs amputated and his tongue removed. I guess killing was too good for him? Or something.
I really liked the first season but this was just a mess. If they're planning a third season they don't leave any clues as to what it might be about. Not that I'd want to watch after how boring and pointless most of this season was. Maybe they can actually let Billy get back to lawyering a little?
No comments:
Post a Comment