The Pentaverate (2022) Series Review

RATING: 2/10

ACTORS playing multiple roles in a film or show is nothing new. From Michael Palin in Monty Python to Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, to..well...Mike Myers in Austin Powers, these forms of comedy will always remain controversial and subjective. As for me, I despise most of them, so you expect how I'm going to feel about this embarrsing Netflix series.

Canadian journalist Bruce Baldwin (Mike Myers), alongside his understudy Reilly Clayton (Lydia West), are searching for their next big story after recently being fired. Their meaningless final job leads them in the direction of The Pentaverate, a secret organisation who have been manipulating events for millenia, and it's up to Baldwin to expose their dark secrets in order to save the world from an impending danger.

Mike Myers returning to these type of over-the-top, eccentric chaarcters has certainly been a blessing for many viewers, but for some it has proven to be the opposite as The Pentaverate is detritus due to its lazily written story and even worse dialogue given to highly talented actresses and actors. Keegan Michael-Key and Ken Jeong for the few episodes they appear in, with Michael-Key particvuarly getting time to showcase his wide range of comedy. However, therein lies the major problem with this Netflix series. Pentaverate's relies solely on the audiences' expectations to recognise a mainstream celebrity appearing for brief cameos as these well-known names play morphed versions of their own personas; most of the jokes aren't even jokes, relying on their name recognition in order to make viewers smirk for a single second, and this drags on and on throughout the entire series, with the actors being slotted in for new names which was already redundant and tiresome by the end of the first episode. The other form of 'comedy' utlisied is Mike Myer's speciliaty: gross out and shock humour. By mixing constant references and gross out humour, it becomes quite transparent that the writers were sorely lacking an interest in developing characters with the humour beyond the bare minimum, and just decided to insert the laziest form of comedy to capture people's attention before moving onto exposition to advance the plot forward.

There was one redeemable part to the mini series, and that's the fact the comedy was ironically enjoyable to the point where it went full circle and became funny. But this can't be considered a good thing; just because the humour is ironically enjoyable doesn't make the writing any better, if anything, it makes it worse.

I wish there was more to say about The Pentaverate, but I would be repeating myself. To summarise, Netflix's latest comedic mini series is far from a success. Bad writing, lazily written characters, and performances so bad they make the legendary Jeremy Irons look awful, The Pentaverate is one show to not put on your watchlist. Trust me, the ironic perspective you could take isn't worth the nearly 3 hour suffering.