CABLE | Javier Bardem and Amy Adams Strike 'Cape Fear' on Apple TV

"I see something eating at you."

Universal Content Productions / Amblin Television

Cape Fear, the revenge miniseries adaptation of the 1957 potboiler novel The Executioners by John D. MacDonald and both its classic 1962 and 1991 film adaptations, stretches the southern gothic psychological thriller material across ten episodes. Created and showrun by television writer/producer Nick Antosca and executive produced by the duo of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, the eventual and originally attached director of the previous film version, this contemporary television interpretation still maintains its strong Hitchcockian overtones.

Starring the trio of Javier Bardem, Amy Adams, and Patrick Wilson as the central ex-convict client in conflict with his former defence legal representative and her prosecutor spouse, the former is doing his best, most menacing interpretation of the famed Robert Mitchum/Robert De Niro antagonist, the iconic psychopathic killer Max Cady, with the latter on-screen couple (the Bowdens) dialling up their melodramatic Southern drawls. Set in Savannah, Georgia, Antosca plays up the wealthy but dysfunctional family aspect with Joe Anders and Lily Collias' versions of their teenage characters having more direct involvement and internal motivations to the escalating tension.

Bardem and Adams as opposing but corrupt forces of civil vengeance against each other provide the appropriately entertaining sensibility of a classic rat-a-tat-tat rivalry that goes back and forth each episode. All of this is not totally unlike the unforgettable 1993 animated parody of the same material and one of the finest The Simpsons episodes ever, "Cape Feare" (with an "E"), starring Kelsey Grammer as the rakish Sideshow Bob.

Many of the updated twists to Cape Fear's shady dealings enhance the insidious sense of intense domestic manipulation. However, its trashy but harrowing suspense derives from a sweaty atmosphere of sleazy neo-noir doubling as another cat-and-mouse thriller. With all that, the limited series uses its prestige sheen to lift the Southern-fried melodrama about criminal obfuscation and personal justice told through pulp fiction. Each adaptation continues to reflect the deep anxieties of its particular time and era.

Cape Fear's ten-episode season is available to stream weekly on Apple TV.


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