Early in their investigation into the death of an unidentified woman, ISB officer Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) and park ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) discover a few clues in an eerie abandoned shed. There’s a bloody rope laying on the floor, a footprint on the door, and fresh carvings in the rickety wooden walls. Kyle bags the evidence, photographs the etchings, and the two exchange theories about what may have happened here. Then, as Naya heads back outside, a bear slams into the door. Naya falls down as the bear bangs on the thin wood separating it from its prey, roaring in sudden, vicious fury. She scrambles for her sidearm, but Kyle already has gun out. He fires two shots into the air, and the bear runs off.
Not long after that random disturbance, Kyle reminds his rookie colleague that her new gig isn’t like any work she did in the big city. This is Yosemite National Park. It’s the size of Rhode Island, all of which is their jurisdiction and 95 percent of which is designated wilderness. “This is not L.A.,” Kyle says. “Things happen different out here.”
That may be true, given how few bears go knocking door-to-door in Beverly Hills, but there isn’t enough proof in “Untamed.” Netflix’s new crime drama from creators Mark L. Smith (“American Primeval”) and Elle Smith drifts further and further away from its distinctive setting and circumstances across its six-episode story, just as it leans harder and harder on murder-mystery tropes that have all but exhausted their utility. By the end, “Untamed” can only offer more of the same, despite ample opportunity to provide something “different.”
Take our lead, Kyle (please). At first, he’s a familiar detective type but one sporting enough signature characteristics to feel like his own person. He works for the Investigative Services Branch of the National Parks — a real department! — and his elevated status there allows him enough leeway to play the lone wolf. He can ride horseback (instead of driving a car), he can stew quietly (instead of brainstorming with a partner), and he can dictate his own hours (instead of punching a clock, like a chump). Whatever job security he has (which isn’t much, given how often the suits yell at him) stems from his expertise in the lost art of tracking. And you know Kyle’s a good tracker because of how often he pauses mid-stroll, stoops to the ground, and examines a suspicious marking.
But before the first episode is up, the balance between Kyle the archetype and Kyle the individual starts to fall apart. His buddy and pseudo-boss, Paul Souter (Sam Neill), smells bourbon on Kyle’s breath — during his shift — which means, yes, our antihero has a drinking problem. Then he makes Naya, his young Hispanic colleague, pass a series of personal tests before he lends her the respect anyone should extend to a nice coworker who’s only trying to help. And, of course, he spends his nights drunk-dialing his ex-wife, Jill (Rosemarie Dewitt), who’s just trying to get a decent night’s sleep next to her nice new hubby.
Kyle’s after-hours phone calls aren’t rooted in anything as simple as lingering feelings for his lost love. They stem from a fact “Untamed” treats like a twist, but when the turn arrives at the end of Episode 1, it induces groans over gasps. Worse still, his “surprise” backstory knocks Kyle off his horse, so to speak — saddling him with too many tropes for one man to balance.
Bana embodies Kyle’s suffocating cliches with endearing commitment, his gravelly voice, gentle countenance, and steadfast capability combining to form a recognizable portrait of pride and suffering. But there’s too little time for Bana’s performance to deepen or subvert his defining traits, especially as the central case piles on its own stale patterns.
In the series’ sole thrilling sequence, a pair of mountain climbers are sent spinning when a body falls from the cliff’s edge above them and gets tangled in their ropes. As an opening scene, it’s dizzying and disturbing (nor does it treat the nameless mountaineers as expendable dumb-dumbs). But it also cuts away at the peak of their predicament — with one climber dangling beneath the other, hundreds of feet in the air, a corpse caught in between them — in order to shift the focus to more mundane circumstances, aka the investigation we’re meant to care about more than anything save for the characters doing the investigating.
A dead girl. A depressed cop with daddy issues. Can our hero solve the mystery of her death and maybe, just maybe, save his own life in the process? “Untamed” dares to ask the same questions as “Mare of Easttown,” “Happy Valley,” “True Detective,” and dozens of other cop dramas just like them, only not as clearly or convincingly. (Kyle’s sheen of integrity gets pretty cloudy after the final twist.) It also a stretches a movie premise to the length of a miniseries, but what’s more frustrating is that “Untamed” doesn’t add anything distinguishing to the mix, despite an enticing ingredient sitting right there, largely ignored, in the massive form of Yosemite itself.
“Untamed” could’ve been a serviceable genre exercise, allowing the audience to play cowboy in the great outdoors while enjoying the sturdy structure of a modern crime show. But as Kyle and Naya get closer to the truth, they get further away from their natural reality. There’s no tactile joy to dress up the rudimentary chase — no random rainstorms ripping through camp, no snowy mountaintops on summer days, no campfires, no canoe trips, no sense of the wild. On the rare occasion when the series tries to incorporate the perils of the park, the staging is unconvincing and the results are predictable.
The bear never returns, and neither does the difference it made.
Grade: C-
“Untamed” premieres Thursday, July 17 on Netflix. All six episodes will be released at once.
Source link