Nor do we spend much time with Roger and Chris, with the storyline not even fully set up yet, yet alone resolves. Voight oozes class in the short scenes that he has, but truthfully, we barely spend any time with him. They’re loosely linked to the character we were desperate to see more of, Jon Voight’s Jonas Hodges, who’s shaping up to the big villain we’ll be booing and hissing for the next year.
Is there terrorism involved? By the time the mysterious men turn up at his house, you can pretty much guess the answer. Chris has uncovered something untoward at work, and wants Roger to approach his mother direct with him. The third and shortest narrative strand, meanwhile, sees her son, Roger, receiving a phone call from an old friend, Chris.
Can he save the children? Can we have a good shoot-out scene in the village? Will he get them all to the US embassy before the helicopters leave in, oooh, an hour’s time? And will he snarl at a few people along the way? Before you can even ask the man the time, Bauer’s weapon is holstered, and the clock is ticking. But before he can do so, a local rebel warlord, who is recruiting children to be soldiers in his battles, targets the village school. After a serious conversation or two with his old colleague Carl, played by Robert Carlyle, he decides it’s time to move on. It shouldn’t be the trickiest case to prove, we suspect.
However, his new existence is rudely interrupted when a subpoena is served on him by the US ambassador’s Chief Political Officer Frank Trammell, demanding that he return to the States to face questions over his ‘forceful’ interrogation style. Now, he’s living in a small African village, doing noble things like helping out the children, distributing materials, and generally proving himself to be a nice human being, once you look past the violence, torture and body count. But bridging the events of seasons six and seven is this 80-minute-ish television movie, that picks up over a year after we saw Jack Bauer last. Season six came off our screens some eighteen months ago now, and understandably, many eyes are on the early-January season seven debut of the show, to see if it can fix some of the well-charted missteps of last time round. Redemption for Jack Bauer – again – is the obvious thrust of proceedings, but equally, redemption for the piss-poor sixth season of the show, that collapsed under the weight of half-baked characters and tepid twists, would do no harm either.
Back when the producers of the 24 television movie altered its title from 24: Exile to 24: Redemption, you couldn’t help but wonder as to whether they had a double meaning in mind.
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