The Continental

The clearest skip here. Three episodes, roughly four and a half hours, on how a young Winston Scott took control of the New York Continental in 1975. No film references it, Chapter 4 was made without it, and the one thing it explains about Winston is something the films were better off leaving unexplained.

The central problem is the action. These films exist because stunt professionals directed them and shot what they staged in wide, legible takes. This was made for television on a television schedule, and the fights are cut the way ordinary television cuts fights, which removes the single quality the brand was built on. A John Wick production where you cannot tell who is standing where is a strange object.

The period is handled as a reel of needle-drops rather than a setting, and the budget shows in how few people are ever on a street. Colin Woodell is capable and faintly anonymous as Winston, a hard note to avoid when the part is defined by Ian McShane's lightness, and Mel Gibson plays the villain at a pitch the material cannot support.

There is one good episode's worth of material in here, mostly in Ayomide Adegun's young Charon and in a late raid on the hotel that briefly remembers what these are supposed to look like. Watch it only if you have seen everything else and want more of the institution, and expect much less than the films.