Cape Fear Review

The third screen version of John D. MacDonald's novel arrives as a ten episode limited series, and the running time is both the whole problem and most of the pleasure. Javier Bardem plays Max Cady as a man performing courtesy at people he intends to destroy, and the critical response is close to unanimous on him: he is the most unsettling thing in the series, and he manages it mostly by staying still. Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson give the Bowdens far more marital rot than the films bothered with, one of them the lawyer who defended Cady into a plea and the other the prosecutor who offered it, which hands him real cracks to work in.

The direction commits to a humid, overlit summer look that suits the material, and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg lend the production their names as producers. Then the episodes keep coming. Reviewers who admired the opening hours found the machinery increasingly absurd as it stretched, with reversals invented to fill weeks and a legal spine that will not survive a second thought, and the response splits unusually wide between the enthusiasts and the eye rollers, with a solid minority of reviewers filing outright pans.

Dialogue is the weakest element, heavy on threats delivered as scripture and on characters explaining their own psychology out loud. Watch it for the performance. Bardem is doing something genuinely unnerving, and the show around him is a good pulp thriller wearing a prestige runtime it has not earned.