The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 1 (2023) Review
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 1 (2023) Review
Picking up many years after The Walking Dead left off, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is the brave and fearless leader of her own community and spends her days trying to build a stable and happy life for her son, Herschel (Logan Kim – GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE). However, when her community is ransacked by a group of ruthless raiders and her son is taken hostage by a warlord known as The Croat (Željko Ivanek – SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI), she has no choice but to leave the safety of her home and track him down.
Meanwhile, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a fugitive on the run, relentlessly pursued by a group of marshals. No longer travelling with his wife and daughter, he is responsible for the care of a young girl named Ginny (Mahina Napoleon – NCIS: HAWAI’I).
When – in a twist of fate – Maggie’s path crosses with Negan and Ginny, she discovers that Negan has a long history with the psychotic crime boss who has her son. Despite their past conflicts, the once-sworn enemies have no choice but to form a fragile alliance.
As they venture deeper into the grim, walker-ridden streets of Manhattan, it becomes clear that the scars of their violent past may be just as menacing as the current dangers they face… It’s now a matter of fight or flight for the pair that were once enemies as they navigate a concrete jungle that has long been isolated from the mainland and harbours unique horrors they have never encountered before… Can our dynamic duo survive the terrors of the city that never sleeps?
THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY falls into the same trap as other seasons with THE WALKING DEAD universe by favouring talking over walking or by offering up anything remarkable incident-wise. This would not be a problem if the conversations varied in any way. They don’t, they are cyclic and what’s more they are unremarkable. You’ll overhear more interesting conversations stood in a supermarket check-out queue.
The central duo Maggie and Negan – Cohan and Dean Morgan reprising their roles from the original TV series – are appealing but like every other character in DEAD CITY they are not well-rounded and performance-wise are called upon to just give the same facial expression throughout. Throughout DEAD CITY adheres to a safe template much like the overhyped, over-praised and equally dull THE LAST OF US but at least that HBO series managed to spice things with remarkable bursts of action to balance out the meaningless drivel that masquerades as conversation.
DEAD CITY does offer up livelier moments amid the waffling but, as with the unrelenting dialogue, this too is by-the-numbers and consequently as lifeless as the undead that pop in and out of the narrative. Also if you’re going to nod towards John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, a far superior offering in every single way, then you really should up your game rather than just coast along on the association.
