Even at the height of his movie star fame, Eric Bana was the epitome of the Hollywood B-lister – the guy you called when you’d been turned down by Brad, Leo and every actor in your Rolodex named Matt or Chris. He remains reliably anonymous in the enjoyably okayish new Netflix thriller Untamed, bringing grouchy charisma to the part of park ranger Kyle Turner – a grumpy crime-buster who never leaves home without his trusty horse.
Turner is a special agent with authority over the huge sweep of Yosemite National Park, a vast and quasi-wild – “Untamed” if you will – Narnia deep in the state of California. As anyone who has visited will tell you, Yosemite is both beautiful and vaguely scary. There are signs everywhere warning visitors to pack away all food lest it attract bears. Similarly, romantic walks into the woodlands may be interrupted by encounters, olfactory and otherwise, with all-too-fresh mountain lion dung.
But it is a very human menace that comes to the attention of Turner after a woman’s apparent suicide at the peak of El Capitan, the massive rock formation overlooking Yosemite. The assumption is that she either died by suicide or slipped and fell. Turner, though, suspects foul play – leading him to inscrutably declare, “You can’t spell wilderness without wild.”
As is the way with hard-bitten detectives, Turner’s sleuthing skills are matched by chaos in his personal life. He and his wife, Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), divorced several years earlier following a tragedy that is gradually unpacked across the season. Haunted by flashbacks to the day everything changed in his world, Turner medicates the pain in the classic solitary cop style of drinking alone and drunk-dialling his ex.
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Untamed is formulaic and a bit cheesy, lacking the meditative grit of a more sombre detective show, such as Mare of Easttown. But it has a nicely noirish zing. That is no great surprise when you consider that one of the classics of the noir genre, Humphrey Bogart’s High Sierra, likewise made use of the ominous majesty of the California wilderness.
Bana does well with the cliched part of a lone cop whose best friend is his horse (he travels by hoof to maintain a connection to the land). He is supported by a strong cast, including Sam Neill as his grizzled superior and Lily Santiago as a single mother newbie officer freshly arrived from Los Angeles. Plus, there is the mystery of the woman’s death, which is drawn out skilfully and with great tension.
With fewer and fewer of us holidaying in the US, it’s also a treat to experience, albeit at one remove, the majesty of America’s great outdoors.
Untamed is on Netflix now
