Lights Out

This was really a top series, but of course they cancel that. Just like happy town. :-(

More than once in the 1970s we got up in the middle of the night to watch TV for yet another "Battle of the Century". It was the time of living legends like George Foreman, Joe Frazier and super sportsman and show beast par excellence Muhhamad Ali, previously known as Cassius Clay. Real sportsmen for whom you would happily interrupt your sleep in order to follow their matches directly on television, even if the quality of the images was, certainly in the beginning, not very high. Which brings me right to the question: Would I have got out of my bed in front of Patrick "Lights" Leary at night if this fictional world boxing champion fought a world title with the heavyweights from "Lights Out"? I am sure not, and that is also the weakest point of this series. Despite the fact that he is a big boy, the protagonist Holt McCallany lacks all the dynamics that the former world champions in boxing had, which makes that as a boxer he comes across as anything but credible. Muhammad Ali was also a big boy with his 1.90 meters, but it was amazing how smoothly he turned around his opponents. "Move like a butterfly, sting like a bee" was sometimes said, but the bee sting was a real sledgehammer when it hit target. Which immediately brings me to the second weak point of this series. The action and how it is portrayed is simply substandard. Nobody has to believe me, but when a heavyweight world champion puts a punch on your body with full force, a shock wave goes through your entire body. If this happens in this series, you will not see any muscle moving on the back of the person who may receive the blow. Normally, of course, if there is no contact. Not that I would have expected visual highlights alla Robert de Niro in "Raging Bull", the epic about Jake LaMotta's career and also Martin Scorsese's masterpiece par excellence, but still, a little more credible action scenes would have been welcome. Unfortunately the rest of the story is pretty standard and cliché, nothing that has never been shown a few times in the average TV movie about the same subject. I would say, only look when there is really nothing else.