Cape Town has a wealth of characters and cross plots that requires you to pay attention. The seemingly divergent stories all come together for an exciting finale. The characters are well drawn and detailed, right down to the background actors. Cape Town itself is a major visual draw card and I loved the quick shots around the cape that open each scene. Worth watching.

Give this thing a pass. First, it's bad in itself, despite having the iconic South African character actor Arnold Vosloo as the villain and the star of Norwegian crime series "Varg Veum", Trond Espen Seim, as the protagonist. They pointlessly wander around, Seim forced to spout clichéd "antisocial jerk" lines at whoever's available, mostly Boris Kodjoe's Snook, and Vosloo being pretty much nonexistent. The rest of the cast isn't much better, if not outright worse, with Marcin Dorocinski's Coolidge wandering around hungover and Isolda Dychauk's Irina being nothing more than swimsuit-clad eye candy. And to add insult to injury, even the quality of the camera work itself tanks for the last two episodes, the scene of human trafficking/murder investigation being shut down in episode 5 being particularly painful to watch. Second, it's a bad adaptation of the source material. The original A-plot involving the Mauser Killer was mangled to shoehorn Arnold Vosloo's Robin van Rees, a character not present in the book, as the mastermind behind the Killer's roaring rampage of revenge, despite leaving the most important detail of said rampage untouched. Worse yet, the bunch of nonsensical B-plots were tacked on instead of the book's bank robberies, and awkwardly tied into the main story, just to make Vosloo's villain even more villainous, and cartoonishly so. Third, the source material is a bad knockoff of the 1983 Clint Eastwood vehicle "Sudden Impact". That in itself should have made the decision to film it questionable, even twenty years after publication and over thirty since "Sudden Impact" premiered, if only for the shocking lack of originality. Seriously, you might want to watch "Sudden Impact" instead.

A star rating of 7 at this time?? How can this be? I ask. Cape Town is possibly the worst miniseries I have ever watched, and a huge disappointment for me, as a big fan of all Deon Meyer's novels. I wrongly believed that a series based on one of his books could not fail. I was also looking forward to seeing a South African offering. If Cape Town is any benchmark, their television industry needs another 50 years of evolution.I have been sitting here trying to find some redeeming feature and/or something positive to say. Alas I can't! (Other than that the two lead actors were very easy on the eye.) In terms of production, some things were JUST adequate, nothing whatsoever was done well. Somewhat surprisingly, very little use was made of the beautiful Cape scenery.Overall the acting was stiff and amateurish; one or two of the female actors gave creditable performances, but not one of the men was believable. As for the accents of the two non-South African lead actors...these were not even close to an attuned ear. Boris Kodjoe was significantly better at everything than his Norwegian partner, Seim. My view is that South African actors would have been a far better choice.I don't recall the book being so difficult to follow. As a TV story, it's just too convoluted to work. The producers could have (and should have) left out half the pretty much irrelevant subplots, which did nothing more than distract and confuse.Anyway, no point analysing it any further...it just sucked. I hope Deon Meyer doesn't let this production team anywhere NEAR his Benny Griessel novels.

Based on Deon Meyer's novel "Dead before Dying", this series should have had enough going for it to come out tops. Unfortunately due to a rather disastrous screen-play and some extremely amateur acting it has become a prime belly flopper. The two actors in the main roles are Norwegian and Austrian. Both attempt to imitate South African accents (and very red-necked ones too). Kodjoe is probably more successful but Seim never manages to get rid of his Norwegian accent and his line about growing up in Goodwood was just not credible. Both of them seemed to be in the wrong country, wrong series. And that is where the credibility issue of this series begins and falls. Continuity in the camera work was another problem. Constant interpolation of random shots of areas in and around Cape Town were constantly thrown in for no reason and only served to make this confused screen-play even more nonsensical. Most of the South African acting is awfully staid and artificial (the embarrassing scene with the neighbors commenting on Drew Wilson's homosexuality was a typical example). Good camera work (Cape Town is always wonderful to look at) but the screen play is confused, drawn out and suspense is almost non-existent.