I'm watching the 2009 Syfy channel remake of The Phantom. It's based on the Lee Falk comic strip. directed by Paolo Barzman and written by Charles H. Knauf and Daniel Knauf. Barzman has directed a lot of TV shows like Highlander, Queen Of Swords, Haven, Being Human and Lost Girl. Knauf was a producer and writer on Carnivàle, Wolf Lake and a good number of other programs. Some of those programs are better than this new adaptation. It takes forever to get to The Phantom and I'm already fast forwarding to get through some of the boring parts.
The story starts with Kit Walker's mother driving off a pier with her son in the car. The boy survives and the people chasing her don't know he's ok. Twenty years later Kit has another name and he's living with a family who gets murdered right quick. The Singh Brotherhood is looking for him, they've been tipped off that he's still alive. Kit's gathered up by the Bpaa Thap which is the Jungle Patrol, an organization that was set up by the first Phantom. They are now a high tech law enforcement agency. The Director of Field Operations Abel Vandermaark introduces him to the organization and Guran is assigned to him as his aide. There's the usual, why me, blah, blah, blah stuff. There's some training and the like.
Kit calls Renny, the ambulance driver he liked in his home town. Cameron Goodman plays Renny. She was in a lot of TV that I never saw. The SB goes after her and her cop father. Kit goes home but they shoot the dad while he was standing right next to him He takes Renny and her dad to his Bangalla (a fictional island nation in the Indonesian archipelago) HQ and goes after the criminals. There's plenty of fighting and the like. Some of the locations look nice but I bet they are stock footage.
Most of the show looks pretty good but I sure don't much like the costume. It's all high tech carbon fiber ya'd ya'd. Poor Isabella Rossellini plays the developer of a mind control program you can download to people over their cable box. They use it to brainwash viewers to kill people and then kill themselves. The Phantom and team rumble their game and the leader of the SB has her team wiped out. Sandrine Holt plays Guran. Some might remember her from the John Woo series Once A Thief. It wasn't as entertaining as I hoped, I thought it was all about average, and it seemed too modern to be The Phantom. It's a story that needs to be set in the past. I enjoyed the Billy Zane film from 20 or so years ago. It was more like the comic was and the 1920's is a great era for The Phantom. I'll re-watch that but I would bother with this version of the story again.
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