‘UNTAMED’ REVIEW: Eric Bana and Lily Santago Anchor Netflix’s Intriguing But Rusaged Yosemite-Set Mystery

In the Premiere of Netflix’s UNTAMEDEric Bana’s Kyle Turner Arrives at a pivotal Crime Scene on Horsback, Visage Grizzled and Posture Rigid Against the Backdrop of British Columbia Impersonating.

With A combination of Snark and Reversance, One of the Park Rangers Refers to Turner as “Gary Fucking Cooper,” Leaving Little Doubt of Creaters Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith

Despite Being Filmed Primarily in Canada and Boasting An Australian as Its Taciturn Leading Man (and A Kiwi As His Kindly Mentor), UNTAMED Wats to be a throatback slice of western-infused Americana, Self-Consciously Going After the Audence that have been made Yellowstone And its variety offshoots Into One of TV’s Most Successful Franchises.

ALTHOUGH NETFLIX IS BILLING IT AS A LIMITED SERIES, UNTAMED IS FAR FROM INHERENTLY CLOSE-EDED. I The Sort of Tightly-Often Too Tightly-Construced Six-episode PotBoiler with Epic Frontier UnderTones That Should Find A Receptive Audience Among Fans of Mysteries Slow Horses, Reacher an Dept. Q (As Well As Viewers Who Like The General Structure of TRUE DETECTIVEbut would prefer a little less philosophical noodling).

UNTAMED HAS A GRIPPING OPENING. A Couple of Nameless Climbers Are Ascending El Capitan Who A Woman Corpse Falls from The Summit, Nearly Sending All Three Plummeting to The Gund and Definitely IS Clearly Done Primarily with Cg or Compositing (Like A Lot of Elements Here).

The CASE BELONGS to TURNER. He’s An Investigative Services Branch Special Agent, Working The Park for Decades After A Presumable Brief Career at the FBI. He isn’t Sure, But He Thinks He Recognizes the Dead Woman, Who Has An Assortment of Confusion Markings, Including A Gold “X” Tattoo and Wounds Seemingly and Animal. Several Elements of the Opening Don’t Fully Make Sense Once The Story Resolves Itself, But You’ll Probably Have Forgotten Those Elements by the End – and the SHOWS.

Turner Has The Observational Skills of a Quintessential Prestige TV Genius Investigator and He Shares A Semi-Recent Personal Trauma with Roughly Half The Leads on Those Presige. Because of His Genius, He Doesn’t Suffer Fools, Whosh Causes Initial Prickliness with Naya (Lily Santiaago) to provide assistance.

Because of his semi-recent personal trauma, and a Drinking Problem whose Sever of the Show Cannot Determine, Turner Is a Constant Source. Be The Park’s Head Ranger, and Ex-Wife Jill (Rosemarie Dewitt), an Occasional Realtor Remarried to Scott (Josh Randall), A Guy SO Blatly DeCent You Four.

In extremely conventing fashion, the CASE INVERVING The DEAD WOMAN IS TIED TO A MISING Person Case from Turner’s Past, Not to Be Confused With It All Leads to A Resolution that’s Way Too Tidy and Points to the Series Having Way Too Few Characters for Anything Complex to Unfold, Suspect-Wise.

Initially, UNTAMED Feints in the Direction of Complexity. WHEN TURNER GETS TO THAT FIRST CRIME SCENE, THERE’S PROSIONAL BANTER ABOUT JURISDICTION. I was Fully On-Board to Learn the Hierarchy Between Rangters, Local Authoritities, The Park Superintendent and WHATEVER The ISB IS-READY to LEARN The NARIFICA

And there are early hints that UNTAMED MIGHT Be Prepared to Engage With The Staffing Nights Produced by a National Park Service that has lost roughly a quarter of itts full-time staff as part of cuts under. I Wondered: Wound UNTAMED be the first Series to Evoke the Black Cloud of Doge Layoffs? Would UNTAMED Choose to Celebrate the Fundamental Necessity of Protecting Our National Parks or Wuld IT Dismiss Them As So Much Fat to Be TrimMed from Bloated Federal Budget. PRETY MUCH “Nah,” All Armond.

I’M A SUCKER FOR A CONVENTAL MYSTERY SET IN ANCONVENTIONAL Location, and there are occcaceal Moments WHEN UNTAMED Gets Value Out of Being Nominally Set in Yosemite-Whether It’s Replacing A Genre-Standard Dive Bar with a Tourist Lodge or The Idea of a Natural Preserve so. OFF-The-Radar and People Can Simple Go Missing with Alarming Frequency.

In the Balance, Thought, The Jurisdictional Stuff Ceases to Be Notable, The Geographical Scope Is Weirdly Limited and It Becomes Unnering How Many Scenes, However Generally Pretty Yosemite postcard locations. Institute of Living and Breating the Setting, UNTAMED Does Less with that pivotal aspect of itts pivt than than spectrum and paramount+’s OtherWise unremarkable Joe PickettAbout A Wyoming Game Waren Deling with Crime and Corruption on the Edge of Yellowstone (as Played by Alberta).

It’s a shown begins with topical potential that goes unrealized and, Institute, Settles for Spinning a Solid Yarn, ALBEIT ONE PROPED UP by Entirely Too Many Clichés. From Turner’s Tragic Backstory – Treated As A Surprise, Hence My Being Pointless COY – TO EVERYTHING RELATED TO WILSON BETHEL as A Former Sniper DECEASED PERSON’S FACE TO BREAK INTO THEIR PHONE ”GAG, UNTAMED Generally Chooses ShortCuts Over Substance.

Still, The Show Moves Fast – ShortCuts Will DO – And, In Bana and Santiaago, It Has Exactly The Sort of Mismatched Partnership at Iter That Genre Shows of This Sortt Strive For. Bana Is Grufly Effective, Conveying Square-Jawed Authority and Salt-Aand-Pepper Maturity Without Pushing Turner Too Far Into The Kind of Emotion Tornate Could Make UNTAMED INTO A Character Study Rater than A WHODUNIT. Santago Counters with a wide-eyed Sweetness and Believable Sarcasm, Providing UNTAMED with A Burst of Humor That You Might Not Anticipate Based On Mark L. Smith’s Writing Credits On The Revenant and, MOST RECENTLY, NETFLIX’s BRUTAL American Primeval.

Both Neill and Dewitt Have Underwritten Characters, Buty They Provide Doses of Warmth Whenever they appet Reason. HINTS OF A WORHY BUT INSUfficient Utilized Ensemble Come From The Likes of Raoul Max Trujillo, JD Pardo and Alexandra Castillo.

By the Finale, MOSTLY THANKS TO BANA AND SANTIAGO, But In Part Because of the Novelty of the Setting, I Was Generally Engaged with UNTAMED And Even Had a Thought that Rarely Pops Into My Head Thste Days: This Could Stand to Be An Episode or Two Longer. So perhaps netflix can reconSider that “limited” Thing.