Imagine The X-Files without the scares, Buffy the Vampire Slayer without the wit and Kolchak: The Night Stalker without the charm, quirkiness and individuality and you’ll have a pretty good grasp on the (recently canceled) Sci-Fi Channel’s supernatural series, The Dresden Files. It’s sort of The X-Files for dullards; slow-paced yet simultaneously over-explained and obvious. This is one of those series that is so mediocre and so lacking in interesting characters and story nuance (or even interest) that you can read a book or talk on the phone for whole stretches of an installment and not miss anything important when you return to it. Everything is crushingly obvious…and dull.
Based on a series of novels by Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files is the story of a handsome wizard named Harry (no, not that one!) who basically spends his adult life as a private eye; taking on supernatural cases in Chicago (which was also Kolchak’s turf). Harry’s cases pit him against the likes of werewolves (“Hair of the Dog”), involve him with vampires (“Bad Blood”) and put him in conflict with other malevolent creatures, like skin walkers (“Birds of a Feather.”) For some reason, these moments are never remotely frightening. In “Birds of a Feather” there is a crow-person - a feathered humanoid monster - and it looks more comical than scary. Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, it never says anything clever. Because the monsters don't frighten, the episodes as a whole lack a sense of menace and feel rather flat.
Handsome Harry (Paul Blackthorne) is aided in his investigations by a friendly English spirit named Bob (Terrence Mann), who has been cursed to live for all eternity inside his own cracked skull (!) because he once used forbidden black magic, but who also can conveniently materialize in Dresden’s office and serve as this private dick’s Q or armourer, providing Harry with such goodies as “a doom box,” essentially a supernatural explosive device which is handy for defeating evil creatures. Harry also works with lovely Chicago detective Connie Murphy (Valerie Cruz), a hard-boiled cop who is predictably skeptical about magic, but definitely has her romantic sights set on the saturnine Harry.
What’s good about The Dresden Files is the manner in which it attempts to fashion a larger magical world around Harry; a world which includes mediums, a mysterious High Council, and the temptation to use black magic (a big no-no, as you can guess). The mythology of the books is potent, interesting, and complex, but it’s just a minor backdrop in this lugubrious adaptation.
The first Dresden Files episode aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, “Birds of a Feather,” sees Harry helping a little boy who possesses the same magical “Gift” as Harry, and the episode is an occasion to reveal some back story (via flashback) from Harry’s youth in Atlantic City in 1981, including his mother’s gift of a protective “shield” bracelet, and a look at life with his father, a failed magician but a lovable loser. Also, the concept of magic coupled with the film noir or detective format is a good one, if now slightly over-utilized thanks to such efforts as Angel Heart (1987) and Lord of Illusions (1995). By itself, the concept isn’t fresh enough to sustain a series with such weak writing.
Based on a series of novels by Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files is the story of a handsome wizard named Harry (no, not that one!) who basically spends his adult life as a private eye; taking on supernatural cases in Chicago (which was also Kolchak’s turf). Harry’s cases pit him against the likes of werewolves (“Hair of the Dog”), involve him with vampires (“Bad Blood”) and put him in conflict with other malevolent creatures, like skin walkers (“Birds of a Feather.”) For some reason, these moments are never remotely frightening. In “Birds of a Feather” there is a crow-person - a feathered humanoid monster - and it looks more comical than scary. Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, it never says anything clever. Because the monsters don't frighten, the episodes as a whole lack a sense of menace and feel rather flat.
Handsome Harry (Paul Blackthorne) is aided in his investigations by a friendly English spirit named Bob (Terrence Mann), who has been cursed to live for all eternity inside his own cracked skull (!) because he once used forbidden black magic, but who also can conveniently materialize in Dresden’s office and serve as this private dick’s Q or armourer, providing Harry with such goodies as “a doom box,” essentially a supernatural explosive device which is handy for defeating evil creatures. Harry also works with lovely Chicago detective Connie Murphy (Valerie Cruz), a hard-boiled cop who is predictably skeptical about magic, but definitely has her romantic sights set on the saturnine Harry.
What’s good about The Dresden Files is the manner in which it attempts to fashion a larger magical world around Harry; a world which includes mediums, a mysterious High Council, and the temptation to use black magic (a big no-no, as you can guess). The mythology of the books is potent, interesting, and complex, but it’s just a minor backdrop in this lugubrious adaptation.
The first Dresden Files episode aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, “Birds of a Feather,” sees Harry helping a little boy who possesses the same magical “Gift” as Harry, and the episode is an occasion to reveal some back story (via flashback) from Harry’s youth in Atlantic City in 1981, including his mother’s gift of a protective “shield” bracelet, and a look at life with his father, a failed magician but a lovable loser. Also, the concept of magic coupled with the film noir or detective format is a good one, if now slightly over-utilized thanks to such efforts as Angel Heart (1987) and Lord of Illusions (1995). By itself, the concept isn’t fresh enough to sustain a series with such weak writing.
Every character relationship on The Dresden Files feels canned and familiar. Dresden is the mystery man with a dark past but a good heart, meaning he’s a cliché. Murphy is the “tough cop” of a million past productions doing the banter-thing with Dresden, and introducing the whole tired milieu of the police procedural. Bob is the most interesting character in the mix, but is used inconsistently by the writers. In one episode, he’s brilliantly and madly creating complex magical formulas out of thin air, literally before the viewer’s eyes (“Birds of a Feather”), but in the next, “The Boone Identity,” he’s a stupid vehicle for exposition, asking questions of Dresden about, of all things, magic (and the reasons Dresden is taking a blood sample; and what it can be used for). Which is he, expert or neophyte? The answer: whatever the script requires.
The story plots are also derivative and crushingly obvious. Take “The Boone Identity” for example. In this installment, Dresden wrangles with a “body jumper” who marshals the ancient relic called The Lock of Anubis to steal bodies and attain immortality. As Harry describes it, the Lock is a sort of “Get out of death free card.” The story begins as Dresden aids a man whose young daughter was killed by a robber and who is now a ghost, desperately trying to tell her mourning father something important about her death. It turns out that the robber stole an Egyptian stone tablet (the aforementioned Lock of Anubis) from her father, and then carjacked one of the richest and most powerful men in Chicago, a fellow named Miller. Miller killed the robber, or so it seems. End of story? What do you think?
So Harry goes to visit Miller to ask him questions about how he killed his carjacker/robber, and Miller – who clearly has something to hide – dismisses Dresden…but doesn’t even show him out of his palatial home. Instead, he conveniently goes to see his visiting masseuse in another room, thus allowing Dresden the opportunity to see an Egyptian tattoo on his neck and shoulders when he strips down. Then, with continued access and no supervision, Dresden wanders around the house a little longer, and finds Miller’s collection of Egyptian artifacts, including a statue of Anubis. Dresden slowly (and I mean slowly…) starts to put together the notion that Miller is actually the robber; that he used the lock of Anubis to switch bodies with a wealthy man.
Forgetting for a moment the fact that genre fans have seen the body switch story a million-and-a-half times, one need ask only one simple question: if you were illicitly stealing bodies (and hoping to do so again the very next day…), would you jeopardize your entire plan and permit a probing detective – one who is clearly suspicious - to walk around your house unattended (and maybe find your relatively unique collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts while he’s there) – all while you get a massage?! Or, more realistically, would you simply walk Dresden out, lock the door behind him, and go to your massage after he’s gone? It’s amazing that The Dresden Files hinges critical story developments on such contrivances. It’s bad writing, pure and simple. Given even an infinitesimal amount of thought, the writers could have at least had Dresden break in later, rather than being invited in and left to nose around.
Alas, this sort of problem is the norm, not the exception on The Dresden Files. I realize that the show has developed a fanatical and devoted fan base who was sorry to see it go, and one can only guess that such devotion is based on the series’ potential rather than what it actually achieved. Indeed, there are little glimmers of greatness here, in Blackthorne’s performance, in the hints of a “larger” mystical world, in Bob’s back story, and so on. I realize I will anger the faithful with this review (and I am still picking shrapnel out of my ass over my negative reviews of Supernatural and Ghost Whisperer). But the blunt fact of the matter is that if The Dresden Files had aired in 1992, before the world knew The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Millennium, the new Doctor Who and other wondrous genre series of today, it would likely be championed as an excellent genre series. But those other efforts – rife with comedy, horror, pathos, wit and irony - only reveal here what’s totally and completely absent; the essential elements that keep The Dresden Files from feeling truly magical.
The story plots are also derivative and crushingly obvious. Take “The Boone Identity” for example. In this installment, Dresden wrangles with a “body jumper” who marshals the ancient relic called The Lock of Anubis to steal bodies and attain immortality. As Harry describes it, the Lock is a sort of “Get out of death free card.” The story begins as Dresden aids a man whose young daughter was killed by a robber and who is now a ghost, desperately trying to tell her mourning father something important about her death. It turns out that the robber stole an Egyptian stone tablet (the aforementioned Lock of Anubis) from her father, and then carjacked one of the richest and most powerful men in Chicago, a fellow named Miller. Miller killed the robber, or so it seems. End of story? What do you think?
So Harry goes to visit Miller to ask him questions about how he killed his carjacker/robber, and Miller – who clearly has something to hide – dismisses Dresden…but doesn’t even show him out of his palatial home. Instead, he conveniently goes to see his visiting masseuse in another room, thus allowing Dresden the opportunity to see an Egyptian tattoo on his neck and shoulders when he strips down. Then, with continued access and no supervision, Dresden wanders around the house a little longer, and finds Miller’s collection of Egyptian artifacts, including a statue of Anubis. Dresden slowly (and I mean slowly…) starts to put together the notion that Miller is actually the robber; that he used the lock of Anubis to switch bodies with a wealthy man.
Forgetting for a moment the fact that genre fans have seen the body switch story a million-and-a-half times, one need ask only one simple question: if you were illicitly stealing bodies (and hoping to do so again the very next day…), would you jeopardize your entire plan and permit a probing detective – one who is clearly suspicious - to walk around your house unattended (and maybe find your relatively unique collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts while he’s there) – all while you get a massage?! Or, more realistically, would you simply walk Dresden out, lock the door behind him, and go to your massage after he’s gone? It’s amazing that The Dresden Files hinges critical story developments on such contrivances. It’s bad writing, pure and simple. Given even an infinitesimal amount of thought, the writers could have at least had Dresden break in later, rather than being invited in and left to nose around.
Alas, this sort of problem is the norm, not the exception on The Dresden Files. I realize that the show has developed a fanatical and devoted fan base who was sorry to see it go, and one can only guess that such devotion is based on the series’ potential rather than what it actually achieved. Indeed, there are little glimmers of greatness here, in Blackthorne’s performance, in the hints of a “larger” mystical world, in Bob’s back story, and so on. I realize I will anger the faithful with this review (and I am still picking shrapnel out of my ass over my negative reviews of Supernatural and Ghost Whisperer). But the blunt fact of the matter is that if The Dresden Files had aired in 1992, before the world knew The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Millennium, the new Doctor Who and other wondrous genre series of today, it would likely be championed as an excellent genre series. But those other efforts – rife with comedy, horror, pathos, wit and irony - only reveal here what’s totally and completely absent; the essential elements that keep The Dresden Files from feeling truly magical.
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