Anyone planning to watch this on Netflix next week? Anyone care?
As usual the press are starting to gang up even before the programme has aired, here's one from The Guardian....
Derren Brown: Sacrifice – have the illusionist’s party tricks lost their shine?
Brown, once about entertainment and fun, has now restyled himself as an all-powerful, egocentric sage. And he’s lost his magic in the process
Fiona Sturges
Derren Brown, celebrated illusionist and king of coercion, is a clever man. He discovers things about people that the rest of us cannot, because he can see into their souls. Derren Brown looks down at the camera when he talks on TV because it makes him appear authoritative and a little bit menacing. Derren Brown has a new TV special called Derren Brown: Sacrifice (from Friday, Netflix), in which a man with a malfunctioning moral code must learn the error of his ways. But it is mainly about Derren Brown and his astonishing genius, hence his name being uppermost in the title.
The mentalist, who once was all about entertainment and fun, has now restyled himself as an all-powerful sage. A sage who sees intolerance as being symptomatic of a bigger problem. He has therefore devised a plan to fix the little people by teaching them about kindness, empathy and fearlessness, after which we will all have learned the most incredible lesson. Derren Brown’s guinea pig here is a white man called Phil who has questionable views on immigration, and whom Brown hopes he can rewire as a 21st-century hero using a mysterious neck implant, a phone app and the power of suggestion.
Brown has decided the best way that this Florida-born father of two – who has a third child on the way – can demonstrate his growth as a kind and loving human is by rescuing a Mexican man from being shot by a gang of bikers, and that he should do this by taking the bullet himself. Apparently, care in the community doesn’t cut it any more.
Brown believes that providing Phil with an independent psychological evaluation before taking part in the show gives him carte blanche to reach inside his mind and make him a “better” human being. The magician-turned-guru wants us to know he’s on the side of the angels and so says things like: “It’s in the dialogue between sides that we find the truth, and humanity flourishes”, apparently unaware that he sounds – how to put this? – like a sanctimonious knobhead.
Brown is keen to assure us that “everything you see is 100% real”, like a secondhand car salesman who says that the mileage on that motor definitely hasn’t been tampered with, although the jeopardy is never his. Even David Blaine’s self-aggrandising stunts begin and end with David Blaine. Brown is a lot like the huckster hypnotists you see on YouTube getting grown men to bark like dogs and women to climax in their seats, only he is educated, has a bottomless budget and wears nice suits, all of which make him appear trustworthy and morally upstanding. He likes to hug the subjects of his “experiments” at the end so that, rather than punching him in the face and calling their lawyers, they hug him back and thank him for allowing them to soil themselves in front of the nation.
Derren Brown’s God complex has reached such gargantuan proportions that he makes Kanye West look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Derren Brown is a clever man, but his party tricks have lost their shine. Derren Brown needs to put a bloody sock in it.
Hmmmm... not exactly an open minded piece but perhaps only to be expected, same thing happened with Russian Roulette, Messiah and Miracle. Let's wait and see!