Leverage – Season 1

Posted May 24, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Nathan Ford is a former insurance investigator who lost his job and has a grudge against his former employer who denied treatment for his son when he got cancer.

One day he gets approached by a businessman who asks for his help to retrieve some stolen property he’s dubious but when he finds out he can get back at his former insurance company he decides to take the job anyway. He gathers a group of criminals he encountered in his previous job and gets started…

Sound and Vision:
The image quality of this DVD is reasonable but nothing more. The normal shots are crisp and have a nice feel but many of the special effects look cheap and and the external plane scenes in the episode “The Mile High Job” clearly are made with CGI. We’ve seen better in that regards.

The sound then. My god, what did they do? This is by far one of the worst tracks I’ve heard in a long time! The positioning is completely off, dialogues seem to come from the rear and effects right next to you. I’ve looked around and it seems that other releases of this series don’t have this same issue which makes me think it’s a flaw in the transfer that’s only present in our version (Benelux). Hopefully Indies will set things right and release a better version soon.
For the rest I can say that the sound overall is a bit numb compared to other recent releases.

Extras:
– Deleted Scenes
– Behind the Scenes
– Writer’s Room
– Special Effects
– Leverage gets Renewed
– The Beth Riesgraf Actress Spoof

A couple of rather standard features but always nice to have

Conclusion:
Leverage is a series that takes elements from movies like Mission Impossible and Ocean’s Eleven and combines them into a rather simple but somewhat entertaining television show that is perfect to pass time when you’ve got nothing else to do. The series resembles a lot of the BBC’s Hustle series which has a similar setup. Here we do get a lot of famous B-actors passing by but on the other hand Hustle has that English flair going for it. When it comes to direct comparison, Leverage is more typical American style with flashy tricks but rather superficial while Hustle delivers more stubstance.

On the technical part I can only hope that Indies will put a different version on store shelves as the sound of the retail package we received is plain awful.

Butterfly Effect, The Tripper, The