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Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe return to wrap things up before sending Criminal Intent off to TV Valhalla....
Shout! Factory / 330 Minutes / 2011 / Unrated / Street Date: March 12, 2013
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 it rather than question its specific episode-by-episode value. But even though Law & Order - Criminal Intent: The Final Year is perhaps not quite as dramatically reliable as its immediate predecessors, it's constantly understandable why there continues to be such a rabid audience for this type of programming.
And Vincent D'Onofrio is back! It was kind of fun to have Jeff Goldblum lead the show’s cast on its Ninth Year set, but Vincent’s salt-and-pepper wolfman presence is just what Criminal Intent needs: he’ll do his damnedest to get the job done, and he’s more than a little frayed around the edges – a perfect combo for the crime drama TV format. Kathryn Erbe is also on the case again for the show’s swan song compilation, a factor that makes it resoundingly clear that its creators wanted to get back to basics before sending the thing off into the sunset.
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. Come to think of it, the show as a whole never really did. R.I.P., old buddy: I’d miss you if there weren’t twenty reruns of you and your kin on the air every hour.