For a few years now we have been living in a world without certainties. Nothing is guaranteed anymore and not even with money, with a lot of money, you can buy success. When I write this text, The Continental has not been renewed for a second season and Prime Video, the platform that operates it internationally, has not issued one of those statements in which it boasts about the numbers of viewings, new subscriptions or impact on the social networks of a product that was promoted before its release.
One of the assets of the series already appeared in its full title, The Continental: from the world of John Wick. The other, the presence of Mel Gibson in his cast, was also conveniently vaunted. A project connected to one of the biggest and most unpredictable cinematographic phenomena of recent years and a superstar who seemed to have an allergy to series. It seemed like a guaranteed success. Clearly it hasn’t been.
If we use the adjective “machirulo” to refer to a series we will also have to accept the term “aunt series” applied to fictions that are much more than that. However, The Continental doesn’t seem to me to be much more than an empty joke. Now that we can make the joke that a script seems written by an artificial intelligence (I have done it many times in this section), series like this remove the layer of humor from that phrase. Laced with references to every sister-in-law, The Continental is an insufferable imposture. From the use of sarcastic music (you know, having a carol play while a man is beheaded), a resource that the series believes is daring and is only a copy of a copy, to the visual bet, as expensive as it is overheated, everything here is secondhand.
The Continental: from the world of John Wick believes that it is a mix of Peaky Blinders, Snatch and Scorsese and indeed it is, but taking the worst of Peaky, all the garrulousness of Guy Ritchie and Scorsese only the million that the pilot of Boardwalk Empire. Of course, much worse is his attempt to adhere like a tick to a mythology, that of John Wick, which he sometimes seems to parody. But no: The Continental is serious. Its disorientation reminds me of The Get Down, that nonsense that Baz Luhrmann put on Netflix a few years ago and, above all, El Continental, the Spanish series with which the dark Frank Ariza showed that someone at TVE owed him huge favors. . So pitiful is The Continental that not even having Mel Gibson on board is worth mentioning. Mel is in the series for what he is: to put on one of the most expensive pots on television this year. And no, I’m not going to quote John Wick because it seems in bad taste to connect such a cool character and film saga with this pretentious and catastrophic stupidity that plunders the Keanu Reeves saga without getting loot of any kind. Hopefully John Wick 5 tells how John Wick discovers that he is using his name in vain and decides to take action on the matter. Burn it all, Keanu, burn it.
