{"id":69514,"date":"2025-07-17T09:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T09:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/69514\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T09:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T09:16:10","slug":"untamed-review-eric-bana-leads-yosemite-set-murder-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/69514\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Untamed’ review: Eric Bana leads Yosemite-set murder mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cUntamed,\u201d a quasi-police drama premiering Thursday on Netflix, is a vacation from most crime shows, set not in a big city or cozy village but in the wilds of Yosemite National Park<\/a>. (Never mind that the series was shot in British Columbia, which has nothing to apologize for when it comes to dramatic scenery, and whose park rangers are not threatened by draconian budget cuts nor their parks by politicians\u2019 desire to sell off public lands.) <\/p>\n

The mountains and valleys, the rivers and brooks, the occasional deer or bear are as much a part of the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne as the series\u2019 complicated, yet essentially straightforward heroes and villains. Lacking big themes, it\u2019s not so much meat-and-potatoes television as fish and corn grilled over a camp fire, and on the prestige scale it sits somewhere between \u201cMagnum P.I.\u201d and \u201cTrue Detective,\u201d<\/a> leaning toward the former.<\/p>\n

Created by Mark L. Smith (\u201cAmerican Primeval\u201d<\/a>) and Elle Smith (\u201cThe Marsh King\u2019s Daughter\u201d) and starring Eric Bana and Sam Neill, Antipodean actors wearing American accents once again, it\u2019s a limited series, though, for a while, it has the quality of a pilot, introducing characters that could profitably be reused \u2014 with perhaps a little less of the trauma peeking out at every corner. Of course, if the show becomes a fantabulous success, the Netflix engineers may contrive a way to make it live again; it\u2019s happened before.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntamed\u201d starts big. Two climbers are making their way up the face of El Capitan when a woman\u2019s body comes flying over the cliff, gets tangled in their ropes and hangs suspended, dead. She is hanging there still \u2014 the climbers have been rescued \u2014 when Investigative Services Branch special agent Kyle Turner (Bana) rides in on his horse.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere comes f\u2014ing Gary Cooper,\u201d mutters grumbling ranger Bruce Milch (William Smillie) to new ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a former police officer (and single mother, with a threatening ex) newly arrived from Los Angeles. (The horse, says Milch, who regards it as a high horse, gives him \u201ca better angle to look down on us lowly rangers.\u201d) What are the odds on Vasquez becoming Turner\u2019s (junior) partner? And on a difficult relationship developing into a learning curve (\u201cThis is not L.A. \u2014 things happen different out here\u201d) and turning almost \u2026 tender?<\/p>\n

More heroically proportioned and handsome than anyone else in the show, a man of the forest with superior tracking skills, Turner is also a mess \u2014 a taciturn mess, which also makes him seem stoic \u2014 barely holding himself together, drinking too much, living in a cabin in the woods filled with unpacked boxes, undone by the unaddressed family tragedy that broke him and his marriage. (The dark side of stoicism.) Sympathetic remarried ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt, keeping it real), who herself is only \u201cas happy as I can be, I guess,\u201d and sympathetic boss Paul Souter (Neill), try to keep him straight. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve locked yourself away in this park, Kyle,\u201d Souter tells Turner. \u201cIt\u2019s not healthy.\u201d Turner, however, prefers \u201cmost animals to people \u2014 especially my horse.\u201d Nevertheless, he has a couple of friends: Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel), a wildlife manager \u2014 that means he shoots things, so be forewarned \u2014 also living in the woods, but without the cabin, is the toxic one; Mato Begay (Trevor Carroll), an Indigenous policeman, the nontoxic one. And he\u2019s sleeping with a concierge at the local nice hotel, just so that element is covered; it\u2019s otherwise beside the point.<\/p>\n

If the dialogue often has the flavor of coming off a page rather than out of a character, it gets the job done, and if the characters are essentially static, people don\u2019t change overnight, and consistency is a hallmark of detective fiction. The narrative wisely stays close to Turner and\/or Vasquez; there are enough twists and tendrils in the main overlapping plots without running off into less related matters. (Keeping the series to six episodes is also a plus, and something to be encouraged, makers of streaming series. Your critic will thank you for it.) Still, between the hot cases and the cold cases, with their collateral damage; hippie squatters from central casting chanting \u201cOur Earth, our land;\u201d a mysterious gold tattoo, indigenous glyphs and old mines \u2014 there is an especially tense scene involving a tight tunnel and rising water \u2014 the show stays busy. Though last-minute heavy surprises don\u2019t register emotionally \u2014 trauma overload, maybe \u2014 you will not be left wanting for answers, or closure.<\/p>\n

And you will learn quite a bit about vultures and their dining habits \u2014 not what you might think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cUntamed,\u201d a quasi-police drama premiering Thursday on Netflix, is a vacation from most crime shows, set not in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":69515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,49021,276,19919,49017,719,2961,224,2444,5337,4659,49019,23287,32758,6166,4370,28738,49018,49020,9272],"class_list":{"0":"post-69514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-cabin","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-character","12":"tag-eric-bana","13":"tag-horse","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-los-angeles-times","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-netflix","19":"tag-park-ranger","20":"tag-public-land","21":"tag-sam-neill","22":"tag-series","23":"tag-show","24":"tag-turner","25":"tag-untamed","26":"tag-vasquez","27":"tag-wild"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114867823315086392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}