lunalight-03618 I wonder if Deon Meyer actually had anything to do with this series? He's a brilliant author and I love his work. This series does his body of work no justice whatsoever : the characters are hideously miscast,the storyline is erratic, and it's quite excruciating to watch. A waste of money to produce and a waste of time to watch.Fake or exaggerated accents abound, the characters are overworked to the point of caricature. Whose idea was it to cast Continental actors? A South African author, South African location, a South African talent agent, filmed in South Africa....and we have a bunch of Germans trying very hard to sound like South Africans but making a total hash of it.Very very sad, and no credit to Deon Meyer's work at all. 😣

Mike Give this thing a pass. First, it's bad in itself, despite having the iconic South African character actor Arnold Vosloo as the villain and the star of Norwegian crime series "Varg Veum", Trond Espen Seim, as the protagonist. They pointlessly wander around, Seim forced to spout clichéd "antisocial jerk" lines at whoever's available, mostly Boris Kodjoe's Snook, and Vosloo being pretty much nonexistent. The rest of the cast isn't much better, if not outright worse, with Marcin Dorocinski's Coolidge wandering around hungover and Isolda Dychauk's Irina being nothing more than swimsuit-clad eye candy. And to add insult to injury, even the quality of the camera work itself tanks for the last two episodes, the scene of human trafficking/murder investigation being shut down in episode 5 being particularly painful to watch. Second, it's a bad adaptation of the source material. The original A-plot involving the Mauser Killer was mangled to shoehorn Arnold Vosloo's Robin van Rees, a character not present in the book, as the mastermind behind the Killer's roaring rampage of revenge, despite leaving the most important detail of said rampage untouched. Worse yet, the bunch of nonsensical B-plots were tacked on instead of the book's bank robberies, and awkwardly tied into the main story, just to make Vosloo's villain even more villainous, and cartoonishly so. Third, the source material is a bad knockoff of the 1983 Clint Eastwood vehicle "Sudden Impact". That in itself should have made the decision to film it questionable, even twenty years after publication and over thirty since "Sudden Impact" premiered, if only for the shocking lack of originality. Seriously, you might want to watch "Sudden Impact" instead.

pd711 I'm a fan of Trond Espen Seim and really like his performance as Mat Joubert. The frustration and his inner conflict are very well acted and make me believe the pain he is going through. I've seen him in Varg Veum and was caught by his acting right away. He is even better now in Cape Town! I also really enjoyed the performance of Boris Kodjoe, who I haven't seen in any film or TV series before. The uneven couple works quite good. Sanctus Snook, who is an elite cop, very straight and correct, on the one side and Mat Joubert, who has a drinking problem, is overweight and not so correct, on the other side. The series is a well known and proved crime concept and even though the first episode is a bit slow, I got hooked in the second episode. The cliffhanger at the end of that second episode made me jump right into the next one and enjoy the rest of the series. All in all, a good and entertaining crime show with suspense, action and some funny lines.

papageno-66704 Based on Deon Meyer's novel "Dead before Dying", this series should have had enough going for it to come out tops. Unfortunately due to a rather disastrous screen-play and some extremely amateur acting it has become a prime belly flopper. The two actors in the main roles are Norwegian and Austrian. Both attempt to imitate South African accents (and very red-necked ones too). Kodjoe is probably more successful but Seim never manages to get rid of his Norwegian accent and his line about growing up in Goodwood was just not credible. Both of them seemed to be in the wrong country, wrong series. And that is where the credibility issue of this series begins and falls. Continuity in the camera work was another problem. Constant interpolation of random shots of areas in and around Cape Town were constantly thrown in for no reason and only served to make this confused screen-play even more nonsensical. Most of the South African acting is awfully staid and artificial (the embarrassing scene with the neighbors commenting on Drew Wilson's homosexuality was a typical example). Good camera work (Cape Town is always wonderful to look at) but the screen play is confused, drawn out and suspense is almost non-existent.