Eric Bana is most interesting when he’s not playing a straight leading man. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he does in Untamed.
In the new Netflix series, now streaming, Bana plays a quasi-detective faced with a baffling death at Yosemite National Park. The 56-year-old Australian actor gets to be grumpy and grief-stricken, but his wounded brooding isn’t enough to lend color to a character, and story, that trudges along with scant momentum or surprise. It’s not that Bana isn’t perfectly capable of handling the part so much as it fundamentally leans into his weaknesses, forcing him into a sad-and-noble routine that prevents him from doing or saying anything of gripping note.
Whereas Mark L. Smith’s prior American Primeval was undone by its over-the-top excessiveness, the showrunner’s Untamed (co-created and co-run by Elle Smith) has polar-opposite problems, spending six episodes to tell a story that required two hours, max. As vexing as its distension, however, is its mildness—a quality that plagues its stock characters, its ho-hum mystery, and its climactic revelations, which are visible from a mountain peak away.
There’s so little energy and intrigue to this newest Netflix limited series that the only thing which will keep audiences’ attention are its brief panoramas of its majestic setting, whose lush canyons and steep cliffs are far more captivating than anything taking place in and around them.
Kyle Turner (Bana) is an Investigative Services Branch (ISB) special agent at Yosemite National Park. It’s a federal position that sets him apart from his park ranger compatriots, including friend and mentor Paul (Sam Neill) and sarcastic Milch (William Smillie), who has no patience for Kyle’s trademark surliness.
It’s been years since the death of Kyle’s son Caleb (Ezra Wilson) and yet the loss still stings him profoundly, such that he routinely talks to the boy’s ghost, and he’s chosen to remain in the park, adverse mental health ramifications be damned, to stay close to his spirit. Caleb’s demise also resulted in the end of Kyle’s union to Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), who’s remarried to anonymous good guy Scott (Josh Randall) and whom he still drunkenly calls late at night to reminisce about happier times gone by.
Untamed explicates this all patiently while putting Kyle on the case of a woman who plummeted off a cliff and directly into two mountain climbers, nearly taking them out in the process. No one is immediately able to identify this individual, who has a gold “X” tattoo on her wrist, horrible leg gashes that appear to be the handiwork of an animal, and bare feet. An expert tracker, Kyle spies her bloody footprints nearby and quickly deduces that the young woman was fleeing someone or something.
A short time later, his expert eye spots a scuffed rock near more blood and realizes that the mark was created by a bullet—which he subsequently pulls out of a tree, proving (along with further autopsy work) that this wasn’t an accident but a murder.
Kyle is an old-school veteran so Untamed naturally gives him as a new partner Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a former Los Angeles police officer who’s just relocated to the park with her adolescent son Gael (Omi Fitzpatrick-Gonzales). Much jokiness about Kyle’s fondness for horses (and Naya’s discomfort with them) ensues, all as the veteran bristles at having to teach the rookie how to deal with the park and its quirky inhabitants, such as a collection of hippie squatters whom Kyle suspects knew the dead girl.
Because Kyle thinks that the victim’s bracelet means she might have once attended a camp where Jill previously worked, he has Naya search their database for a visual match. Voila, she finds one: Lucy Cook (Ezra Franky), who went missing in the park years earlier and, despite Kyle’s best efforts, was never found.
Putting together the pieces of Lucy’s rough childhood and filling in the gaps of the decade that she was MIA is a job that consumes Kyle, and is complicated by the appearance of a lawyer (Nicola Correia-Damude) who wants more information from the ISB agent about a man whom he failed to locate shortly after Caleb’s passing.
Between Lucy and Gael, Kyle (and Jill) are given multiple surrogate children to figuratively and literally save, thereby making up for their failure to protect their own boy. Untamed augments that basic thread by having Naya’s scary corrupt-cop baby daddy show up to create trouble. None of this, however, feels fresh or vital, and that additionally goes for the strange case of Lucy, which is about as pedestrian as they come and simply leads—after much unenthused plotting—to predictable, eyeroll-worthy bombshells.
Bana and Neill can be such magnetic presences that it’s criminal that Untamed mires them in sloggy sleuthing (Kyle) and protective-boss office work (Paul), the latter of which requires managing the complaints of park superintendent Lawrence (Joe Holt)—a completely superfluous player whose nominal purpose is to create a threat of dismissal for Kyle that the show never takes seriously.
The Smiths’ writing is functional and drab, and though directors Thomas Bezucha, Neasa Hardiman, and Nick Murphy capture the grand beauty of Yosemite, their CGI animals (herds of deer, a ferocious bear) look so fake that they detract from the series’ visual polish. Still, no amount of aesthetic splendor could compensate for the proceedings’ overarching lethargy.
Untamed provides a few suspects for Lucy’s murder (Raoul Max Trujillo’s Native American park employee Jay; Wilson Bethel’s Wildlife Control agent Shane) and ultimately imagines Kyle as not just a canny park gumshoe but a veritable John Wick-ian superhero who takes down bad guys with smoke grenades and rifles, survives gunshots and bomb blasts, and leaps off peaks and into tree branches (to break his fall) while coping with grievous injuries.
Worse, that segue into more action-oriented terrain fails to jolt the material to life; rather, it comes across as merely a tepid attempt to fill this tale’s energy vacuum with clichéd skirmishes and confrontations.
Closure, justice, and healing are the destination of Untamed, which never suggests that it has anything other than easy-bake resolutions in mind. By the time it reaches its conclusion, though, many Netflix viewers will likely have already departed the park.
