Knight de-Rider

Wow! I have never actually had to turn a television show off before the halfway mark because it insulted my sensibilities, my intelligence and ruined my childhood memories all at the same time but last night was an exception. The movie version of the Knight Rider re-launch was a poor excuse for entertainment. Stock characters, poor dialogue, a contrived plot and silliness abounded in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the Knight Rider movie. Here are the three things that ultimately stood out as horrible (just horrible). Too horrible to arrant further viewing:

1) KITT's voice. At least the first KITT's voice was endearingly snobbish, yet could swing between serious and humorous when it had to. Sort of like Stewie from Family Guy. This voice was just plain bad; like a bad impression of the original.

2) Michael Knight (II) wakes up in some ambiguous college dorm on the beach type setting where women walk out of the ocean and shower for no reason at all and the guy's roommate sleeps on the couch while, young, smirking, arrogant, muscle bound, and totally unsympathetic (did I mention young?) Knight wakes up to not one but two hot chicks in his bed. Was this a remake of Knight Rider or Bay Watch? Pitiful.

3) No voice over! What the hell happened to the cool voice over talking about “a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist?”



A couple of things that I admit they got right:

1) Instead of Knight Industries Two Thousand, which sounded way futuristic in the 1980s, this is the Knight Industries Three Thousand, which sounds even more way futuristic.

2) The new car is hot and takes a popular model makes it a character in a show.

3) The theme song gets a heavy metal update. While the old song was cool, the new one rocks.

Too bad what is right with the new Knight Rider can’t fix what is wrong with the new Knight Rider. The original movie was described by Glen A. Larson, as “The Lone Ranger with a car.” He also described it as a “kind of a sci-fi thing, with the soul of a western."

Too bad they couldn’t do the same for Knight Rider as they did for Battlestar Galactica.

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