Excellent show

wackyfuncrazy

I remember watching this as a series when I was younger and noted that it was created by the same person who created the A-Team. It's different from the A-Team and aimed at a more mature audience. People get shot, die and the plot is a lot grittier.

The action scenes are a lot better than the A-Team. For one thing, there are real fire fights in which people get shot, the fights are choreographed much better since Lorenzo Lamas is a very good martial artist and there aren't silly one-liners to spoil them. In the A-Team all we got were punch ups that were obviously fake.

The characters are well developed. Bobby Sixkiller's character is explored in many episodes and I came to like him a lot. Cheyenne became superfluous towards the latter half of the show's run and I think removing her from the cast improved the show. Series creator Stephen J. Cannell played the series' antagonist Dutch Dixon and one can see that he really enjoyed playing him. The character is completely amoral with no sense of good in him at all and it's sometimes funny how he always seems to choose to do the most evil thing possible in any situation. I'd say that the episodes with him in are the best as he's played very enthusiastically by Cannell. Reno Raines on the other hand is completely moral and it seems impossible for him to do anything wrong, even when it would be in his benefit. Dixon and Raines were good opposites and the show benefited from this contrast.

The plots in the non-Dixon episodes are pretty much either Reno (Lamas' character) chasing evil villains who turn out really to be evil after all or episodes in which the people Reno chases are actually innocent (like him) and Reno and the gang trying to prove their innocence. There is a good mix of different criminals: rapists, murderers, mafia, terrorists, thieves, white collar etc and the criminal mind is explored a lot with a few plot twists thrown in for good measure.

The complaints I had of the show were that sometimes the episodes were padded out with scenes of Reno riding his motorcycle with shots of his face, legs, the wheels etc being flipped to back and forth. The scenery was nice on the show so it wasn't that bad to watch this episode padding-out so to speak. The other complaint I have is that the show's extras were composed mainly of people who looked like supermodels. During the episodes we were treated to shots of half-naked beautiful women and while most would see this as a plus, I thought it made the show look cheap. Anyway, these complaints are small compared to how much I enjoyed the show. The action of the show is superb and I watch with anticipation every time Reno or Bobby are fighting villains.

There are a few plot holes such as why Dixon finds it so hard to catch Reno even when he's promoted to U.S. Marshal and that Reno is always hanging around Sixkiller Enterprises so he must be easy to find; but it's easy to ignore these minor details and enjoy the show for its many good points.

score 9/10

wackyfuncrazy 9 May 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2609386/