The second episode of TRUST debuted on Easter Sunday night. Honestly, was caught up watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE before I switched over to TRUST and started it over to catch it from the beginning. SUPERSTAR was about as good as any bad musical might be — Alice Cooper’s Pontius Pilate stole the show. But TRUST started with a bang and helped to push all those terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics out from between my ears.
The show opens with Brendan Fraser’s James Fletcher Chase donning his ten gallon hat and heading off in search of John Paul Getty III who was kidnapped in Rome at the end of the last episode. Fraser talks directly to the camera talking about how 1973 was a bad year for America — Nixon, Vietnam and the kidnapping of JPG III. Fraser looms large in this episode and a meeting with Donald Sutherland’s JPG I and JPG II at the family’s British estate is Fletcher Chase’s first real introduction. He’s ordered to Rome and he’s off with a tip of his hat and a red white and blue bandanna around his neck, and Bible quotes on his lips.
Fraser’s doings make this episode feel like a procedural shot with split screens in taxis, in police offices, hotel rooms and at the home of JPG III’s mother’s house — the always captivating Hilary Swank also comes into her own here in the show’s second installment. Fraser’s early roles found him typecast as kind of a hunky dolt in movies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man and The Mummy franchise. Fraser is older and burlier now, but his physical gravitas serves him well here, and his goofball charms have now become distilled into a kind of homespun sincerity that masks the doings of a dead serious fixer working to negotiate the release of the grandson of one of the world’s richest men. It’s a great turn and it might signal an unlikely renaissance for an actor who many of us might have written off. I’m glad I was wrong about Fraser because Chase is threatening to outshine Sutherland’s JPG III in this series which only got better the second time around.
This latest installment of Trust continues to feature soundtrack gems like “Prisencolinensinainciusol” a number one hit in Italy in 1972 featuring gibberish English lyrics over a groovy dance track…
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