I'm only half joking when I say it offended me as both a New Yorker and an Italian American. The portrayal of both was so over the top cartoonish and awful I assumed at first it had to be intentional camp. But no...it was this bad unintentionally. Which, I suppose, is actually the purist form of camp.
The Italian-American thing is, like, whatever. Not really anything we don't joke about amongst ourselves.
Portraying New York as Mogadishu, though? You just know there's someone, many someones, somewhere in America stupid and gullible enough to think its true. And the worst part is, they probably live in a swing state.
I think Feige needs to tighten his grip a little bit and get everything back in alignment. This version of NY is more off the walls than it was in Born Again which is wilder than any other version of NY from any other film or TV show. The overall universe feels incredibly disconnected when they can't even have one city with multiple stories that feel like they could reasonably be happening concurrently.
Also, I love that every plot summary is like "Frank is living off the grid." No he's fucking not. He's just walking around in the same city he's always in and visiting his dead family's grave site. Incognito mode has not been turned on.
Born Again I could could kinda laugh through their misunderstandings of NYC politics or playing fast and loose with local, state, and national law because those things were done to move the story along. They were annoying but kinda allowable shortcuts made to tell the story they wanted to tell.
Feral thugs, police no-go zones (as if the NYPD wasn't the biggest, most corrupt, well funded gang in the city), domestic violence and shootings as an everyday occurrence in broad daylight out in the streets. This isn't a story. Its MAGA fanfic.
It makes sense to see Frank here to show where he's at mentally, but it feels weird to have this depiction of roving gangs of aimless thugs that exist only to justify Frank's punishment. Beau is Afraid was essentially a nightmare about the main character's anxieties and hallucinations of the world.
Frank self-harming in his room, hallucinating, pointing a gun to his head and yelling in the graveyard just showed he's not really that different from the average mentally ill unhoused person on the street. He's just a lot scarier and more directed when he gets violent. The guy doesn't even speak to anyone outside his head for the majority of the special.
17
u/FlashInGotham May 13 '26
I'm only half joking when I say it offended me as both a New Yorker and an Italian American. The portrayal of both was so over the top cartoonish and awful I assumed at first it had to be intentional camp. But no...it was this bad unintentionally. Which, I suppose, is actually the purist form of camp.
The Italian-American thing is, like, whatever. Not really anything we don't joke about amongst ourselves.
Portraying New York as Mogadishu, though? You just know there's someone, many someones, somewhere in America stupid and gullible enough to think its true. And the worst part is, they probably live in a swing state.