Dreadfully Boring

Boring

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

As others have noted this is not the best special they've done, but importantly it *is* a special - yes, finally, at the end of the season, we get treated to one.How much I've missed the hour-long specials that save us from the tedious and unfunny introductions to 'conversation street' and the infinitely worse celebrity segment. I always thought, throughout the first season, that although the celebrity segment wasn't in the least bit amusing, it was at least short. This season it's like they're punishing us for daring to complain about the celeb section by making it take up about a third of each episode's running time (ergh!).So if only for that reason alone the special gets extra marks.As for the merits of the special itself, well the concepts they came up with were of course fatuous (even for the trio's standards), but people taking offence to the special are either being entirely too delicate or are missing the point that it's meant as a (very good) parody of celebrity engagement with world poverty/hunger.The other reason specials are so much better than the other content on GT (and TG before it) is that it allows for spontaneous comedy, rather than the canned, scripted gags that usually fall flat throughout the rest of the show. So they were plenty of moments of off-the-cuff humour that are the best parts of the trio's routine. The location and journey wasn't as good as most other specials, and the task didn't evolve as they progress, which is the episode's main weakness for me.Still, probably the best episode of the season, if only for the fact that it's an hour-long special that spares us from the worst parts of the regular episodes.

What a great, old style episode, just like they used to be. Never going to be sensitive, always going to send it up, and rightly so. Nice to see them doing things this series that is much more familiar and doesn't seem so strained. They have found their feet on Amazon, and this episode is what they're all about, cars, a task, arguments and laughs.

Ok,it is clear that they are making fun of celebs who fly in and do some charity,get photos taken, and then fly back. I get it. And I don't expect these guys to be sensitive and sincere in their efforts, they always fail intentionally. However,this time it was not entertaining at all. The whole episode was monotonous. In previous specials, they usually did a more variety of things, there interaction with people other than themselves, a change in scenery. This was just the three talking to each other on a 200 mile trip, which was forcefully extended to seem entertaining.

I can see why the rating of this episode is so low. It's not because the episode itself is bad, it's a very typical "special" episode, feels much like old Top Gear special episodes, it's all in one piece, no guests, reviews or studio scenes. In fact it's the most "Top Geary" of all TGT episodes so far in terms of how it was filmed and how it felt to watch. What is bad is the fact that they approach a topic of a country being incredibly poor and people in it starving with an overly silly approach, almost mocking the misfortune of the people indirectly, because they've wasted enough food to feed a 50 people during this episode. It also contains multiple scenes of what some people might consider to be "fish abuse", if you like. Of course, catching fish, killing it, eating it, etc. is a part of nature, as harsh as it may be, especially in parts of the world where people are desperately trying to survive, so expecting a "humane" approach from them is less than realistic. Overall it's a pretty good episode, as long as you approach it knowing that it's going to have things in it that some people might find offensive or repulsive, consider it a more serious episode, a sort of mockocumentary dealing with problems of poverty, lack of food, lack of infrastructure, etc.