The Slap (US)

We've all known for a while that those Swedish balls from Ikea are only so cheap, because they are made from the tender meat of children who have not been picked up from Småland after closing time. When you see a station wagon with an empty child seat with screeching tires thundering through the barrier in the parking garage under the Scandinavian furniture giant, you know that someone in the ball pit is unlikely to sleep at home at night. Blame those parents. Children are terrorists. In fact, evil always seems to awaken in them when you are in a position where you have nowhere to go. Nice crying the entire flight from Schiphol to JFK, because a raisin is stuck in your nose. Game boys on the train with the sound on and those swishing legs that do not touch the ground, but always your shin. Hysterically floundering on the floor in front of Albert Heijn's chips, because the Ringelings are not going home today. You count to ten, but you would actually prefer to hand out that corrective tap on that blond crown to that little one. Especially when mom and dad seem to find reaching level 234 at Candy Crush on their phone more important than raising their heir properly. Hector's birthday! Friends come over and the wonderfully expressive Greek family comes by with trays full of homemade spanakopita, saganaki and paidakia (I will only put this in, so that you also have something to google). Cold beers are slurped on the terrace, while the children in the garden make life difficult for each other. When one of the youngstas is about to ram the fontanelles of one of his friends with a baseball bat and his parents are busier with the glass of wine they just poured, Hector's cousin, Harry, has had enough. Pats. The slack is a fact, everyone is shocked and the party choosing within the group of friends has begun. Did Harry go too far or could the education of that little baseball hooligan just use a little corrective impulse? NBC is not immediately the channel that really warms me up. Hannibal was nice and under light pressure I also want to admit that I'm going to be okay on Chicago Fire, but in general NBC's productions are a bit too American and covered with plastic. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to see that they have ventured into a more difficult script, which you would rather expect from more free-spirited channels such as HBO, Sundance Channel and AMC. The strong cast and solid acting make you forgive the extremely annoying voice-over in the long run and the setup where each main character gets an episode to tell his or her story is something different. As far as I am concerned, NBC is not getting the most out of it and the contribution of Uma Thurman is slightly disappointing with her overacting. That's a shame, because in principle Uma deserves to be adored everywhere after Pulp Fiction, but hey ...