Untamed review: come for the scenery, stay for Eric Bana

Netflix murder mystery series Untamed might be firmly set in the USA, but there’s one trick it pulls from the start that Australian crime fans know all too well: gorgeous scenery and plenty of it.

Yosemite National Park is on stunning display right from the opening scene and there’s no denying the whole place looks incredible. Australia’s collection of scenic coastal towns and sweeping outback vistas better lift their game if they want to remain top dog when it comes to being a great location for someone to stumble across a corpse.

Here the corpse isn’t content to just lie there being dead: it makes a memorable entrance by tumbling off a cliff and falling directly onto a pair of rock climbers. Unlike local crime drama Troppo, which also had a corpse fall off a cliff onto someone last season, these climbers don’t die from the impact – they just swing off the side of the cliff for a few heart-stopping moments while the corpse gets tangled up in their ropes.

Untamed: arms race

These mystery series are in a bit of an arms race: the opening has to be memorable to hook the audience, but there’s only so far you can push things before they get just a bit silly. The aforementioned Troppo’s cliff corpse fell onto someone who’d just had sex and made their tent explode into flames (seriously, it’s hilarious): here the long drop alone is dizzying enough to lodge the corpse in the memory.

Also memorable is Australia’s own Eric Bana riding up on a horse. Described by one of the rangers on the cliff top as ‘Gary fucking Cooper’, Kyle Turner (Bana) is basically the top cop at the park, which is only part of the reason why all the park rangers – apart from the Chief Ranger, Paul Souter (Sam Neill, who together with Bana gives the park a distinctly Antipodean vibe) – hate him.

At first, he just seems like a hardass. Then it turns out he’s a hardass who’s back on the bottle and struggling to recover from a divorce that his ex, Jill (Rosemary DeWitt) has clearly put behind her. He’s also living in a decaying shack on park grounds, just in case you hadn’t picked up on the way that everything in his life but his police work is falling apart.

Luckily, he’s a good cop, and with newbie park ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santigo) helping out – she’s not a big fan of getting around on a horse, but that’s just how Turner rolls – he’s soon digging up clues all over the park. And running into a bear at one point.

Untamed: slow burn

As this kind of mystery goes, Untamed is a bit of a slow burn. By the end of the first episode, we still don’t know who the mystery corpse is, and how she met her tragic demise is still very much up in the air.

Even when it does seem like we’ve found out something, Turner is always quick to point out alternative theories that put us back to square one. You can tell he’s a good investigator because he doesn’t rule anything out, but sometimes you just want to hurry up and get to the good stuff.

Watch the Untamed trailer.

Here the good stuff is Bana’s performance. The slow start is as much about establishing him as a character as it is digging into the details of the crime or introducing the supporting cast, and while Bana’s American accent takes a little getting used to at first, everything else about him is spot on.

As a burnt-out detective with a broken home life and nothing left to live for but the bottle and the job, Turner’s a familiar type. Bana’s an inherently likeable performer, which gives him scope to make Turner legitimately unpleasant early on – by murder mystery standards at least.

Fortunately, before the first episode’s done he’s run into enough long-suffering supporting characters to tip us off that there’s more to him than his gruff exterior. Sam Neill especially is firmly in avuncular mode here, the nicest boss (well, sort of) anyone could ask for. But Bana’s early scenes have an edge Untamed could have used more of.

What this series does have is plenty of layers for Turner and Vasquez to uncover as their investigation deepens. Things might end up feeling a little too well-connected, but that’s how this kind of story goes. Anyone – well, probably not Turner’s youngest kid Caleb, but anyone else – could be mixed up in anything.

Which is par for the course with this kind of mystery, a solid story well told that serves up plenty of revelations and developments but not all that many real surprises. Come for the scenery, stay for Bana’s slow thawing; Untamed may not exactly run wild, but tame animals have their uses too.

All six episodes of Untamed are available on Netflix from 17 July.

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