24 Season 3

Review By: Alexis Tuminello
AlexisTuminello@TheCinemaSource.com

If there ever was a role tailored made for a particular actor it has to be Jack Bauer for Keifer Sutherland. He was born for this role! I thought he was perfection as Ace in Stand by Me but apparently I was mistaken. (And I’ll just say right here that I always did find him sexy in that one-step-away-from-serial-killer kind of way.)

I am among the group of jaded twenty somethings for whom Tuesday (or is it Monday? It keeps switching but either way ...) night television does nothing. That fact means that I have missed seasons 1, 2, and 3 of 24 (I haven’t seen the fourth either but I can’t just jump in now in the middle.). Today I thank technology for mass producing any entertainment remotely good within a blink of any eye. Now I have all three previous seasons at my fingertips and it’ll probably only be a month or two after this one ends for it to come out on DVD. They are mine. All mine.

24 could possibly be the best show ever created. If not that, then it definitely gets the award for turning the mundane actions of a single day into a national phenomenon. On the other hand it does prove how boring everyone else’s life is in comparison. A well researched model of CTU (a.k.a. Counter Terrorist Unit) and its procedures provide the backdrop for Jack Bauer to run rampant and rule the world. Go Jack!

I attempted to do a little research on exactly what the government’s “real” counterpart to 24’s CTU is but I gave up two minutes into it realizing I don’t want to really know. One, for the obvious reasons and two, if I knew the reality would I really get so involved in the scripted drama? And the scripted drama is really intense. I didn’t get bored halfway through the season like I usually do. Each episode is a cliffhanger – each commercial break is a cliffhanger. Television does not get any better than this.

Season 3 of 24 revolves about the sale of a lethal virus and then the imminent threat of it being released in every major city in America. Hopefully not plausible, but no one is that optimistic these days (could I be any more of a downer?). Other, more internal, storylines are added as the season progresses – romance, blackmail, murder, you know the drill, but it still works. Though I was still more interested in the main plot and Jack’s role in it but the