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Released by: Mill Creek Entertainment
Released on: February 16th, 2016.
Director: Various
Cast: Patrick Swayze, Travis Fimmel, Lindsay Pulsipher, Kevin J. O'Connor, Lawrence Gillard Jr.
Year: 2009
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The Series:
Patrick Swayze's death from pancreatic cancer at age 57 in 2009 was a huge shock. The actor - famous for his physical grace and ability to shift from sentimental romance like GHOST to balls out action like POINT BREAK, was always the picture of health. His diagnosis, illness and death all happened fairly quickly - making it even harder to process for his fans.
The last thing that Swayze worked on before dying was this tv series. The Beast - about an undercover FBI agent in Chicago working with a younger and inexperienced partner taking down the usual salad bar of mobsters, sex slave traffickers and arms dealers, is riddled with cliches and rewarmed plots. But somehow, it still works as an engaging and exciting work. This is mostly due to Swayze - whose agent Charles Barker is the perfect definition of haunted badass and the majority of his supporting cast. The younger agent - named Ellis Dove and played by Travis Fimmel is more of a cipher but acceptable. The other great plus is the city of Chicago. As someone who lived there for a year in his younger days through a particularly brutal winter I can tell you that this isn't a city for the weak kneed. The Beast captures it's greasy underbelly beautifully, from the dirty elevated subway tracks to the dank back alleys. The whole series was shot in the winter which amps up the bleakness.
Barker has a shady past, plenty of dead bodies in his history, and is under secret investigation by the FBI's version of Internal Affairs. The plots can be smelled a mile off in normal wind conditions. Investigators try to turn Barker's partner snitch. Eastern European arms dealers want a rocket launcher. Other Eastern European rouges want to run a sex slavery ring. There's some unnamed Asian operatives trying to thwart the revelation of their country's nuclear status. One of the funnier aspects of The Beast is that for a show focusing on domestic intelligence, there's an awful lot of foreign bad guys running around.
The real tragedy of The Beast isn't that it got cancelled due to Swayze's death. The tragedy is that it gave us a glimpse of the second half of Swayze's career: a great gritty character actor that would have buried his pretty boy past and gone on to even greater things. There are quite a few scenes here where the pain that Swayze was bulldogging his way through is obvious: he's gaunt with that haunted look those who have spent time with the terminally ill know so well. But there's some frightening determination there too. He was an intense and passionate actor.
R.I.P.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Mill Creek's presentation for The Beast is cheap but efficient and about what you'd expect for a 2 disc set with an MSRP under $10. The anamorphic 1.78:1 framed image is decent SD though it is interlaced. I didn't notice any compression artifacts or serious flaws related to digital tinkering despite everything being squeezed onto two discs. Nothing really "pops" here in terms of color either, but that's related to the artistic aesthetic more than anything else. The Beast was shot in the grimiest parts of Chicago in the dead of winter, often at night. The whole vibe is intense and gritty and the atmosphere is quite bleak. This isn't Miami Vice people.
Audio is a pretty strong lossy Dolby digital stereo track that has some nice bottom end and solid fidelity. Upper and middle range is devoid of audible flaws and all dialog and sound fx cones through clearly. There are no subtitles.
The Final Word:
Patrick Swayze's final work is a bittersweet affair. He was dying while he made this, and while The Beast is a cliche ridden affair on many levels, it's also engaging, intense and briskly paced with a first rate group of supporting players surrounding Swayze. But he's the show - make no mistake. And he's terrific. Recommended.
