reviewed by Charity Bishop
                   

A man screams in agony as various tortures are inflicted on his flesh. He refuses to tell his tormentors anything until the pain becomes too great; he reaches his breaking point, and screams out what they want to hear. The information is rapidly taken to President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), on a fishing sojourn with his son. The recently elected, divorced politician and his media team are astounded and disturbed to discover that a nuclear bomb is planned to detonate sometime in the next 24 hours in the city of Los Angeles. Palmer orders a High Terrorist Watch and his staff contacts all agencies across the Midwest, alerting them to the danger. He has one request of the Counter Terrorist Agency in L.A to get Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) on the case.

A year after the devastating events surrounding the death of his wife, Jack Bauer has quit his job at the CTU. His daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) is attempting to recover outside her fathers influence and now works as an au pair for a wealthy young couple in the suburbs. He refuses to become involved until a phone call from the president asks for his time and patience. He agrees to visit CTU and listen to a briefing by George Mason (Xander Berkeley), but promises nothing. When learning the truth, Jack refuses to assist them, instead making a phone call to persuade his daughter to get out of LA as swiftly as possible. While en route to his car, he sees a mother and her child walking along the street and changes his mind. 

Together with fellow agents Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) and Michelle Dessler (Reiko Aylesworth), Jack is determined to stop this bomb from going off. He will have to go deep undercover, with serious consequences. The CTU is targeted, his life is placed in danger, and an involvement from high-class government shakes Palmers presidency. Numerous incidents are set to occur on this date, including the marriage of Marie Warner (Laura Harris) to an Arab-American. Her older sister Kate (Sarah Wynter) has never liked or trusted Reza and hires a private investigator to look into his financial accounts, fearing he may be embezzling from the country. What she finds instead drags her into the midst of chaos when CTU shows up on their doorstep. Kim also has serious problems when she discovers her employers husband has a penchant for domestic violence. She will stop at nothing to protect Megan (Skye McColle Bartusiak) even when it comes to kidnapping.

As a television series, 24 is successful because you have time enough to digest each episode and await the next, but watched consecutively becomes increasingly more unbelievable. The concept that anyone could live through such an unholy amount of terror (kidnappings, beatings, shootings, car accidents, and torture sessions) in the course of a single day is just plain fabrication. The plot moves swiftly on some fronts, slowly on others. Kim's storyline is believable for the first half dozen episodes but then becomes predictable and slow: everywhere she goes, you know inevitably it'll turn wrong. She meets up with one psycho after another, some of them with dark intentions, others just unintentionally freaky. Palmers political end of the spectrum is intriguing enough for a while but then bogs down in endless plot twists. By the time an actual decision is made on whether or not to bomb foreign countries in retaliation, the viewer has grown tired of all the bantering. Poor Jack loses one snitch after another, goes through hellish torture experiences, and winds up carrying a full load. His story, and the trials of Michelle and Tony at the CTU, is the most interesting. 

Fans of the first season will be pleased to see some of the same characters back in the second, with a heavy dose of new faces to balance the familiar adrenalin-pumping episodes. George Mason, self-professed jerk, redeems himself. Tony goes through some morphs, being likable and yet villainous when it suits him best. Michelle is the most emotionally attractive character, and some conversations will bring even the most hardened viewer close to tears. This DVD collection is also much more charitable than the first where content is concerned. There's no outright sexual activity (there are implications), less profane language, and redeeming messages. The content is still grueling, the storyline rampant with unsavory torture scenes (usually the victim is stripped naked, but the camera is careful not to show too much), and many shoot-outs. In one of the first episodes, Jack delivers a severed head in a leather bag. Many people are shot and killed with gory results; the body count is extremely high. 

A dead woman's bloodstained body is found in a trunk; a man throws his little girl to the floor, hitting her head on the edge of the bed. Kim is forced to defend herself numerous times, taking a tire iron to a mans head and shooting another person dead. In the aftermath of rumors of attack, Americans are provoked to retaliate against innocent Arab citizens. Several men attack an Arab agent and beat him to death. Jack is forced to remove a computer chip from a dead mans body; the camera lingers on the blood. Television programs don't have anything higher than a TV14, but 24s violent and thematic content is closer to an R. The torture scenes are the most difficult to watch, as people are burned, stabbed, electrocuted, cut with electrical blades, and injected with various painful medications. My biggest problem with this is that most of the time, good guys are involved. I cannot condone torture under any circumstance, and do not take pleasure in seeing the hero use it, even for the good of the country.

When an Arab refuses to give information, Jack beats him and then forces him to choose between his information and the life of his son. (SPOILERCTU did not kill his eldest child; it was staged to gain cooperation.) After shooting a female suspect in the arm, he refuses to give her pain medication and squeezes the wound to make her talk. He learns vital information from one man by telling him his death will be painless if he cooperates (the spy was injected with a slow-acting medication that makes his lungs collapse so he suffocates). Palmer also condones the torturing of a cabinet member in order to discern if he was in league with foreign terrorists. I also did not appreciate the obvious Bush Administration bashing in the last several episodes. There is also some language (mostly mild profanity and abuse of deity, although various characters use the term screwed and d*cked around once or twice). 

Carefully obscured nudity appears in the first episode and several thereafter. A woman intimates shell sleep with a man if hell give her something out of her boyfriends locker. They go into his office and close the door. Present are themes of racism, blackmail, brainwashing, and political corruption. A man is shown vomiting in one scene; another suffers from radiation poisoning with mildly gruesome results; a bomb goes off in a terrorist unit, killing fifteen people and wounding others. A woman is deliberately detained from going to the hospital in order to gain information, further jeopardizing her life. Kim is also locked in with a mentally deranged man who we fear might have aggressive intentions, but nothing comes of it. She's seen in a t-shirt and panties in her opening scene; her employers husband looks lustfully at her. Several times her tank top becomes mildly sheer.

For die-hard action fans, 24 is fabulous. It has many twists and turns, emotional highs, and down-to-the-wire cliffhanger endings. But its also extremely violent, much of its subject matter is cruel, and many of its themes challenge the viewer to wonder when enough is enough do we condone torture in order to gain information, sacrifice one life to save thousands of others, or rationalize bad behavior? The means are just as important as the end. This is my primary fault with 24 they make out that as long as everything turns out all right, the means of getting there isn't important. This is a lie. As Christians we are responsible for our actions; God doesn't ask us to compromise our values. The irony is more than present when, at the conclusion, Palmer says bravely, God bless America, when he should have been praying all along.