Page 1 of 3
Jeff Goldblum stands tall as the dude in charge on this Ninth Year L&O: CI set, and it turns out the guy does a helluva job....
Shout! Factory / 690 Minutes / 2010 / Unrated / Street Date: December 11, 2012
With conveyor-belt consistency, the Law & Order universe continues to offer up more and more material - there's so much of it out there at this point that it's easier to just succumb to its presence rather than question its specific episode-by-episode value. But even though Law & Order - Criminal Intent: The Ninth Year is perhaps a slight step down in quality from its immediate predecessors, it's constantly understandable why there continues to be such a rabid audience for this type of programming.
And where Vincent D'Onofrio was the growling justice-seeker who fueled the choo-choo of Criminal Intent's earlier seasons, in The Ninth Year, the reins have been handed over to Jeff Goldblum, whose detective Zach Nichols is a decidedly different lawman. Goldblum as an actor has made a career out of inhabiting characters who always seem like they're never fully comfortable within their own skins, and while this skittishness often drives his on-screen team crazy, I found it breathed a new life into the mysteries at hand here: Jeff brings a winking slyness to his character on this compilation that definitely adds a layer of intrigue to the whodunits at the center of these 2010 episodes.
Does one need to rush out and purchase a TV-on-DVD set like this one right away when a cursory search of your cable listings will likely drum up twenty or more Law & Order reruns in one capacity or another? Probably not. But even operating under less-than-brilliant overall creative consistency, this batch of Criminal Intent never let me down.