The Dresden Files

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STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $39.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 530 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Selected commentaries
• "Making-of" featurette
• Unaired scenes

The Pitch

“What if Hellblazer had been licensed by Aaron Spelling?”

The Humans

Paul Blackthorne, Valerie Cruz.

The Nutshell

Harry Dresden is a scruffy, down-on-his-luck private investigator whose hobbies include badgering Chicago police detectives, never getting the girl, and wizardry. There’s not much call for a freelance wizard in the Windy City, but he does all right for himself, sitting around in his jimmies, talking with his pet ghost, and waiting for the next leggy bombshell to stride through the door with a wad of cash outweighed by her troubles.

The Lowdown

There’s something about CSI that has always bugged me: the investigators never get to employ much deductive reasoning. They have all these nifty tools, see, that find the results for them. The mysteries aren’t resolved through careful steps of logic, but through the careful application of science far enough advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.


Quit having so much fun while I'm stuck in my basement in the dark, damnit.

Enter The Dresden Files, which gets even lazier than CSI and cuts out the “science” charade, and outright attributes everything to honest-to-god magic. This is a terrible way to write crime fiction, or mystery fiction, because it emphasizes the tools over the tool-using humans behind them. That’s the generous interpretation, anyway; the other is that it’s supremely hackneyed writing that relies on magic tools as devices to resolve conflicts the writer couldn’t bring to his own satisfying close.

Not that I have anything against magic being used as a tool in fiction. Hellblazer tends to run with a noir-ish bent, with magic employed at key moments to further the story. The difference between John Constantine and Harry Dresden, at the lowest level, is that Constantine pays for his magic, while Dresden seems to earn a whole lot of something for nothing.

So, you’re a wizard. You can use this nifty scrying spell to locate anyone in the world if you have just a little bit of their DNA. What’s to stop you from using it all the time? In some stories, magicians trade away bits of their soul for access to magic; in others, deals are made with devils to procure just that little bit of power; hell, in CSI the tradeoff is that the machines are limited in what information they can provide. In The Dresden Files the only cost is the $4.99 plus tax for the packet of powdered eye of newt.


The Power of Three with Less Filigree

Without a cost attached to his powers, Harry Dresden comes off as nothing more than a private investigator, but in place of, say, alcoholism or lecherousness or something that adds a wrinkle to his character he gets his dull, convenient magic powers. This removes great handfuls of interest that the audience might find in the character. It’s even worse because there’s nobody else interesting to back him up. There’s only one major dyad in the show, and that’s between Dresden and his ladyfriend on the police force, but their relationship is so uneven from episode to episode that it’s hard to find the spark. (Instead of “Will they or won’t they?” you get “Will she remember his first name this time or won’t she?”)

The scripts lean toward darkness -- with tales of bound demons wishing to become mortal, werewolves killing their own bloodline to rid themselves of the lycanthrope’s curse, and nasty behavior from other monsters of legend -- but without any sort of grounded interest in Dresden, the plots just whirl around like half-organized clouds. The show plays more like Charmed, despite its best efforts. Threats appear, and magic saves the day, costarring Harry Dresden.


Nuclear Man went thattaway!

I do have to commend the writers on one aspect of The Dresden Files, though, and that probably includes novelist Jim Butcher on whose books the show is based: the plots twist enough that very rarely is it easy to guess the outcome from the set-up. From time to time, the one-shot actors get decently emotional, thanks to these unpredictable strains of story. These situations are almost rewarding enough to make up for the weakness of the protagonist. And, to clarify, it’s not Blackthorne’s fault; his acting is well above average, buthis role is near-pointless.

It’s hard to hang a whole show on the flimsy frame of a specter, though, which is exactly what Harry Dresden too often seems to be. He’s a vessel for uninspired magic, a medium through which machinas spit their deuses. The Dresden Files takes a concept promising at least melodramatic interest and turns it into a filthy liar.

The Package

Selected episodes contain commentaries from folks associated with the production, but none are what you’d exactly call compelling. There are also a few unaired scenes and a making-of featurette. Come on, kids, it’s time to get excited.

(As an incidental, the “magic” of Hollywood has a tangible cost associated with it, don’t you think?)

4 out of 10