Expect more action than stealth from Sam Fisher in Netflix’s animated series.
Stealth isn’t the easiest thing to adapt from a game to a TV series. Playing a Splinter Cell game as Sam Fisher, we’re more than happy to spend hours slinking slowly through corridors and stairwells, crouching motionless for long minutes in the dark observing enemy patrol routes, and painstakingly carrying unconscious bodies into darkened corners to secrete them.
But watching someone do that in an animated series? For 20 minutes at a time? It’s hard to imagine that being gripping, which is probably why the stealth sequences in Netflix’s animated series Splinter Cell: Deathwatch don’t last all that long before transitioning into straight action. There’s as much gunplay, knife fighting, and car-chasing in Deathwatch as there is sneaking and slinking around—which isn’t really in the spirit of the Splinter Cell games.
But for a TV show, our hero being more panther than ghost isn’t a bad thing, really. Written and produced by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad and directed by Guillaume Dousse, the action in Splinter: Cell Deathwatch is tense, grounded, and well-coreographed. The episodes are short and go down easy with a streamlined plot and relatively light on dialogue. And Deathwatch does the most important thing a videogame adaptation can: it makes me want to play a Splinter Cell game.Winter cell
As the series opens we’re introduced to an older, more grizzled Sam Fisher than the one we know from the games. Living the quiet life in a snowy and secluded farmhouse in Poland, old man Fisher just wants to be left alone to sip scotch and read Moby Dick by the fireplace while his faithful dog sleeps at his feet.
We’ve seen this sort of retired hero business before, though refreshingly we don’t have to sit through one of those clichéd scenes of his former handler attempting to bring him back into the fold for one last job while he insists he’s retired, he’s out, he’s done with that life. Nope. When a badly wounded agent arrives at his farm with a team of assassins on her tail, Sam doesn’t so much as grumble about getting back to work.
