Fans of Scandal have been anxiously awaiting How to Get Away With Murder, a legal drama produced by Shonda Rhimes. With a title like that, it’s hard not to assume lead actress Viola Davis’s role as Annalise Keating—the lawyer by day, professor by night—will be as an antihero. Well, Keating is scarily good at what she does; according to PluggedIn’s Paul Asay, she “could get Dexter off on a technicality and posthumously clear Breaking Bad's Walter White by framing his wife.” Asay believes this is where the show’s problems begin: “To call Davis's Keating an antihero does a disservice to the tag. Keating and her cohorts don't do bad things for good reasons as much as they do bad things to just win, baby—at any cost.” Not only does Keating’s character come into question, but the rest of the show’s content as well. “Guilty pleasures don't get much guiltier,” admits Asay. And although viewers probably won’t actually learn How to Get Away with Murder, “there's no question this show gets away with nearly everything else.” While Paul Asay worries that viewers won’t be able to get past the salacious substance of ABC’s newest show, Variety’s Brian Lowry isn’t sure the show will be anything different from legal dramas that have come before. Every network has their fair share of courtroom-based dramas, and Lowry says they “are such a well-worn TV backdrop that in order to stand out from the pack, some characters beyond Davis’s had better pop.” Although creator Shonda Rhimes is most well known for Scandal and even earlier Grey’s Anatomy, Lowry believes that Rhimes and Davis are the ultimate “dream team,” and if anyone, these two ladies can be “the cherry on top of ABC’s Thursday-night all-Shonda Rhimes sundae.”
“Director Antoine Fuqua’s reboot of The Equalizer bears little resemblance to the 1980s TV series it's based on,” says Crosswalk’s Jeffrey Huston. Not only does the remake completely change the premise, it “plays like your standard run-of-the-mill adult crime thriller,” with unnecessary violence “cloaked in the ‘virtue’ of so-called vigilante justice.” Although the casting in the film is excellent (Denzel Washington is in the lead role), Huston says this doesn’t excuse the “rather ignoble bloodlust” of “of contemporary cinematic comfort food.” The original television series of the same name follows the story of a highly trained C.I.A. assassin who later becomes a “freelance vigilante specializing in payback and pre-emptive violence in defense of the innocent,” explains A.O. Scott of The New York Times. He calls Denzel “one of our leading middle-aged action heroes,” alongside Liam Neeson, of course. Although The Equalizer might be forgettable, and you probably haven’t heard about it, Scott admits that the Fuqua is an effective director, pulling off “action sequences with bluntness and clarity.”
Larisa Kline is an intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.
