Look! Brand New 24 Preview Trailer! Only Slightly Rubbish!

The new season of 24 has a hell of a lot riding on it - if isn’t absolutely brilliant then it might spell the end of the show forever.

We’ve got a few months left before the seventh season of 24 kicks off, but we’ve just been handed the very first sliver of a hint of a taste of what it’ll be like - a work print of the trailer for the Africa-set 24 season seven preview, 24: Exile.

So what’s it like? Is 24 back to its logic-defying, pedal-to-the-metal best? Or does it look like it’ll be another one of those seasons where Jack Bauer kicks his heroin addiction in 45 minutes and people get terrorised by mountain lions a lot? We’ve got the 24 preview trailer after the jump for you to make up your own mind, but here’s a hint - it’s not great.

You know that a show’s reached its absolute nadir when it shows a nuclear bomb going off in a major city at breakfast and everyone’s forgotten about it by lunchtime, don’t you? Or when the big baddie is the farmer out of Babe leaping around an oil rig like a marionette puppet from a German expressionist horror film.

Not coincidentally, the last season of 24 had both of those, plus a nurse from Scrubs being blinded on a beach by a bomb. It was rubbish. And it hasn’t helped that the new season of 24 has been so long in the waiting - held back by writers’ strikes and jail sentences - that anything less than total magnificence will be greeted with abuse from all quarters.

The new season of 24 needs to work. Not just for us, but for Kiefer Sutherland too - look at the trailer for his new movie Mirrors. It’s a creepy Asian-style horror film, but Kiefer’s wedged so tightly into the Jack Bauer groove that you get the feeling he’ll be tying the mirror-ghouls to a chair, sitting them in a bucket of water and electrocuting them with torn-out wires from a standard lamp until they tell him where the bomb is by the third act.

So, with that in mind, here’s the work print of the preview trailer for 24’s season seven preview - the two-hour 24: Exile. Although it’s just a work print, and shouldn’t be seen as a precise indication of what’s to come, we’ve still managed to glean a handful of tasty plot secrets from it. For instance:

*Season seven of 24 is set in a future where a woman can’t just be elected as president of America, but a woman who appears to be suffering from some sort of alarming face-bloat that’s possibly down to a severe food allergy. That’s progress.

*Jack Bauer wanted to go on holiday to escape his troubles, so he went to a volatile African country torn apart by civil war. From this we can deduce that Jack Bauer is an idiot and probably would have been better off going to the Isle Of Wight or something.

*Jack Bauer gets his face burnt off by a knife - a serious injury that we’re guessing will completely heal in about an hour and a half.

*Jack Bauer shoots a little boy in the face! Probably!

*Now that he’s ripped off Rambo as well as Die Hard, we can look forward to season eight of 24 where Jack Bauer rips off the last third of the Planet Hollywood action hero trio and becomes a destruction-fixated robot from the future. Or a pregnant man. But definitely one of those things.

OK, enough teasing - here’s the real 24 trailer…

So, what do you think? We’d love to know where you stand on this. Are we just setting ourselves up for disappointment by being so excited by the prospect of new 24? We are, aren’t we? We obviously are. It’s going to be rubbish. Jesus, we’re idiots.