MacGyver reboot is more like a pre-pubescent Bond

HOW dare they? If you’re going to tinker with MacGyver, you better do a damn good job, not this total stinker that’s being passed off as a TV series.

OF ALL the TV shows and movies Hollywood has remade, rebooted or retooled, did they really have to go and tinker with MacGyver?

He of the iconic Swiss Army knife, glorious mullet and encyclopaedic brain.

With American TV studios desperately looking for anything with a built-in audience, moves that have led to the 37th incarnation of Real Housewives of Somewhere, it was inevitable that MacGyver was going to be doomed for an update.

MacGyver’s cheesy earnestness worked during its original 1985 to 1992 run because it was solidly of that era. From its earlier Cold War storylines to the later bizarre dream/time-travelling episodes, it was far from perfect but it was an institution.

That institution has just been shattered. The reboot aired in the US a couple of days ago and it will hit Australian screens on October 8 on Channel 10.

If you thought the “reinvented and better” MacGyver was going to pass for enjoyable TV, prepared to be disappointed.

From the first scenes, it’s immediately apparent that this updated MacGyver isn’t our MacGyver when the titular hero steps out of a midlife-crisis sports car in front of a glittering mansion in Lake Como. He’s decked out in a tuxedo and talking through an earpiece to his support crew in a hi-tech van.

This isn’t new MacGyver so much as a pre-pubescent James Bond.

Do you know how the original MacGyver started? With him scaling a steep mountain in Central Asia on his own, wearing a ridiculous pom-pom-topped red beanie.

It may have been cheesy, but it was an 80s cheesy.

One of the main problems with the reboot is Lucas Till is sorely miscast. Till, at 26 years old, is almost a decade younger than Richard Dean Anderson was at the beginning of the original series. It’s not even that he is young, but he looks and plays young.

We’re supposed to believe this MacGyver has graduated from MIT, was part of a military bomb disposal unit and now works for a secret government organisation saving the world? Not buying it. This MacGyver is too much of a lightweight.

But he is much more proficient at hand-to-hand combat than Anderson’s character ever was. While that seems to be a more natural fit for an action hero in 2016, part of MacGyver’s appeal was that despite his huge smarts, he was still a relatable everyman, not a jujitsu master.

Recurring MacGyver characters of old also got a facelift — frequent sidekick Jack Dalton (no longer a scallywag hustler but a former Delta Force soldier), love interest Nikki Carpenter (this version is personality-free) and Pete-now-Patricia Thornton (MacGyver’s boss who has nothing to do in the pilot but say expository lines).

It also gives away MacGyver’s first name in the first few minutes, something that took the original series almost seven years to earn.

To its credit, the new series paid homage to the original series and its fans with references to the trusty Swiss Army knife, chewing gum and MacGyver’s distressed brown leather jacket. Even the theme song starts off with the first few strains of the 80s version.

You may ask yourself how a modern-day MacGyver would even function given how far technology has come and that half the problems he previously solved with ingenuity could be done with a smartphone, or thwarted by a smartphone.

The lustrous mane is still present. So that’s something.

The signature science experiments now seem even less plausible that any of it would actually work in the field. That, somehow, you could get your hands on a biological weapon by sprinkling some plaster dust.

One person who predicted that a reboot wouldn’t take off was Anderson. Last year, he told news.com.au that while he’d been approached a few times to be involved in a MacGyver 2.0, he’d knocked them back.

“I’ve never been interested in doing it,” he said at the time. “My caveat to being a part of any project like that would be if I was going to play the character, it was going to have to written as though he had aged just as much as I have, which means he’s a little overweight, he’s got short hair.

“I think the old audience would have an absolute ball with it. We never took ourselves too seriously but this would’ve really been stepping out. But nobody seems to be interested in that approach.”

While an ageing MacGyver lounging around his houseboat may not have been the most compelling TV, this whippersnapper version isn’t either.

Perhaps new MacGyver’s biggest failing is that it is so generic, with nothing to distinguish it from the other two dozen action crime series on air, other than a passing resemblance to a beloved series from the 1980s.

Like with many reboots and remakes, some things are better left alone.

MacGyver debuts on Channel 10 on Saturday, October 8

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