The decade-long international craze for Scandinavian crime thrillers seems to reach a tipping point with this overstuffed and flatulent boondoggle of a mini-series from Norway. "Mammon" would like to be "The Bridge," leading us down one false path after another to spectacular cliff-hangers and shocking revelations, but the writers are too lazy to come up with plausible reasons for all this frantic action. I hate it when I invest 6 hours in a mini-series, expecting that "all will be revealed" at the end, and the end comes, and I can only shake my head at all the nonsense I've watched and all the gaping holes in the plot. It's almost as if no single person actually read the whole script!
Scene for scene, the show is just engaging enough to watch, but even at this level some of the red herrings are too obvious and the repeated attempts at suspense too repetitious. (OMG! Is that car following us? No, just a false alarm. No, wait, it WAS following us!)
Spoiler: One example of the ludicrous lengths to which the writers will go simply to obtain that spooky "The Bridge" feeling: the package received by the dead man's brother and his wife seven years after his death, containing directions to a time and place and a wet suit, because the dead man knew that at exactly that place, and exactly that day, another death would occur in exactly that way. Amazing! But in the end, this elaborate plot twist turns out to make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER (like much of the plot); it's assumed that we viewers are so stupid we will have forgotten this pivotal scene by the end and won't care that there is no explanation.
They tried to make "The Bridge," but this bridge went nowhere.
Scene for scene, the show is just engaging enough to watch, but even at this level some of the red herrings are too obvious and the repeated attempts at suspense too repetitious. (OMG! Is that car following us? No, just a false alarm. No, wait, it WAS following us!)
Spoiler: One example of the ludicrous lengths to which the writers will go simply to obtain that spooky "The Bridge" feeling: the package received by the dead man's brother and his wife seven years after his death, containing directions to a time and place and a wet suit, because the dead man knew that at exactly that place, and exactly that day, another death would occur in exactly that way. Amazing! But in the end, this elaborate plot twist turns out to make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER (like much of the plot); it's assumed that we viewers are so stupid we will have forgotten this pivotal scene by the end and won't care that there is no explanation.
They tried to make "The Bridge," but this bridge went nowhere.