As long-time readers of this blog know, I’ve been a fan of Kevin Spacey for years.
I also have been a fan of the original BBC version of House of Cards for years. I loved it so much that I ordered the original books from whatever Amazon UK was before it was Amazon UK. I couldn’t believe how awesome Francis Urquhart was! He was evil! He was smart! And he played to win!
When I heard Kevin Spacey was going to be the main character in the new version of House of Cards, I was like, “OMG, this is too much awesome in one place.” And David Fincher was going to produce and direct the first two episodes! And! And!
After having watched the entire thing, I can confidently state: If they bring back this series next year — possibly in some Americanized “To Play The King” — not even Kevin Spacey can bring me back to it.
House of Cards is the story of an ambitious politician who has grand plans for his political future and shows us exactly what he’s willing to do — blackmail, secret deals, and worse — in order to achieve what he wants. The best thing about the UK House of Cards was how smart it was: tight writing, smart characters, assumed the audience could keep up. And when you have your main character talking to the audience about the horrible things he’s doing, the only smart play is to be funny.
How overdone and self-important is the US series? They go to the trouble of renaming the US character “Francis Underwood” and then never make one of the jokes from the original about the media talking about “F.U.” How can you not make the F.U. joke? It’s right there in his name. Name him something else if you’re not going to F.U. him.
The major story problem with the US version is the ending. The ending of the book was one thing, the end of the UK series was something different. The ending of the US version is (so as not to give spoilers) just lame. The ending of a story has to do a couple of things, and one of the main jobs is bring the audience back for Round 2. It’s a tough job. But still: you have a high-profile series, work the ending.
And here’s the major casting problem with this version: Kevin Spacey.
Oh, how it pains me to write those words.
The worst thing about Spacey’s performance is the accent. He’s supposed to be from South Carolina, and maybe he just has fond memories of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but he should have just said, “No” to doing an accent for this. His accent is unbelievably awful. They couldn’t have invested in an accent coach? Not only is his accent all over the map, it disappears for scenes at a time. It disappears in the middle of scenes. At one point he’s doing a British accent (I kid you not). Whenever Spacey loses the accent and concentrates on what he’s supposed to be doing, he’s fabulous. Whenever the accent (some version of it) comes back, he clearly loses the plot and he’s spending too much energy just trying to stay in character.
Fabulous find from House of Cards: Corey Stoll as Peter Russo, the deeply flawed Congressman from Philadelphia. I hope he’s parlaying this into lots of roles, because wow, was he good.
Rating: C. I am deeply disappointed by this show.
I love the idea of original programming, Netflix. Now try harder.