Banshee - The Complete Third Season

Over-the-top is the best way to describe the Cinemax action-drama "Banshee" from executive producers Jonathan Tropper, David Schickler and Alan Ball. If you think Ball's HBO series "True Blood" is extreme, this series makes that one look tame.

Even a simple scene, like two divorced parents meeting at their daughter's school for a parent-teacher conference, begins with a sequence of adrenaline-filled music, strangely saturated coloring, extreme close ups and dutch angles.

The series begins with a chase sequence resulting in vicious vigilante police justice and then cuts to wild, uncensored sex -- and it just keeps going from there.

There's a plot and some characters somewhere in this seemingly random series of sensational, superhuman actions sequences and fight scenes, but it isn't easy to piece together.

Fundamentally our main character is Lucas Hood (Anthony Starr) an ex-con who is somehow able to miraculously erase his identity and re-write it as the sheriff of a rural, Amish-area town, Banshee, Pa. His former lover and partner in crime lives there with her own new identity, Carrie Hopewell (Ivana Milicevic), a waitress who's a long way separated from the woman she was before, the daughter of a gang kingpin, but always walking close to the edge of danger.

The couple had the audacity to betray Carrie's father Rabbit (Ben Cross), and it looks like they may have gotten away with it. The kingpin died peacefully in church (well, a bloody shootout in a church). Still, our heroes are not the types to leave well enough alone. Now they plan to betray and rob Carrie's new lover, a decommissioned Marine with a compound housing millions of dollars.

With the help of a couple of colorful hoods, Sugar Bates (Frankie Faison) and Job (Hoon Lee), this modern day Bonnie and Clyde pursue their next great heist. But Lucas still has to work his day job, and the Banshee police force is ensnared in the conflict between the Amish gangster Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen) and the vigilante leader of the Redbone wing of the Kinaho tribe, Chayton Littlestone (Geno Segers).

To further illuminate or confuse the viewer, this Blu-ray collection includes a series of prequel videos "Banshee Origins" which is recut and re-narrated from another point of view as the "Banshee Origins Saga."

But "Fanshees" (the name for enthusiasts of this hyperbolic TV series) get so many more features than that, including a multi-camera interactive featurette and behind-the-scenes looks at stunts, fight scenes, camera movement, "the showdown" rehearsal and even a title sequence, not to mention deleted scenes and audio commentaries with the cast and crew.

"Banshee: The Complete Third Season"
Blu-ray $34.98 DVD $26.95
www.hbo.com/banshee