Six, Two, and uneven

AMC miniseries ‘The Prisoner’ gets caught in plot loops

November 13, 2009|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

Ian McKellen could probably make Ashton Kutcher’s tweets sound like poetry. The British actor just about sings his lines of dialogue, using melody, dissonance, phrasing, and meter in service of his intentions. With his majestic delivery, he almost gives the existential blather of AMC’s “The Prisoner’’ a sense of profundity. For the duration of this six-hour miniseries, he adds a dignified, rhapsodic luster to throat-clearing bombast such as “The mind is capable of anything, because everything is in it.’’

Alas, McKellen isn’t alchemist enough to transform such a leaden piece of work into gold. Based on the far more entertaining and whimsical 1967 Patrick McGoohan series, the AMC remake is numbingly paced, heavy-handed, aimless, and humorless. Worst of all, there’s not a single character in the cold, visually cliched world created by director Nick Hurran who evokes sympathy or enduring interest. After three nights (Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday) steeped in the gnawing mystery that surrounds these people, you still might not care at all about the climactic What It All Means.

Essentially, “The Prisoner’’ follows a man (Jim Caviezel) who wakes up in a storybook town called the Village where relentlessly cheerful people have numbers instead of names, where individualism is illegal. Dubbed Six, he’s trapped inside this oppressive regime and closely monitored by the dictatorial Two (McKellen). It’s a story blueprint with perennial potential; surely each era has a new take on conformism, on the subversive power of dreams, on the need to know our origins. Questions such as “How did I get here?’’ and “Who’s in control?’’ are part of the human condition, and always ripe for picking by screenwriters. “Lost’’ and “The Truman Show’’ have both brought a timely, propulsive spin to the Orwellian paranoia at play in the original “Prisoner.’’

But the miniseries, which premieres Sunday at 8 p.m., just seems to tread water in a sea of generic perplexity. The addled, ranting Six runs here, and then he runs there; the all-knowing, threatening Two appears here, and then he appears there. They clash. There’s some busy subplotting along the way, as Two deals with a perpetually sleeping wife and a gay son and Six juggles women and betrayal; and yet it’s all just pointless motion that keeps coming back to the confused hero locking horns with the smug villain. Written by Bill Gallagher, the script is the same bell ringing over and over again.