If there’s one thing The Last Frontier, the new thriller from AppleTV+ has going for it, it’s its cast. Which is absolutely stacked, not just with actors you’ll remember from big budget films – Jason Clarke, Dominic Cooper, Alfre Woodard, Johnny Knoxville – but a host of faces that will be familiar to TV fans from the past several years of high-quality TV. This is a very capable set of actors, top to bottom, but boy, did they deserve a better show to showcase their talents.
The series, set in Fairbanks, Alaska, follows the aftermath of a plane crash that sees multiple high-profile federal prisoners freed. You see, the plane was a prison transport and while there are a host of your typical prisoners (Knoxville, for instance, plays a man who killed two US Marshals in a shoot-out), there’s also a super spy – Havlock (Cooper), an asset for the CIA who ended up betraying the US and is now a very dangerous man on the lam. Tasked with helping clean up this mess is the Fairbanks US Marshal’s office, headed by Frank Remnick (Clarke), a family man (Yellowjacket’s Simone Kessell plays his very capable wife, Sarah) who washed out of a big city posting in Chicago before heading back to the cold, seemingly uncomplicated Fairbanks office posting. When Sidney (Haley Bennett, the weakest link by far in this strong cast) enters the fray as a liaison from a multi-facet federal task force attempting to neutralize Havlock before he can complete whatever he’s trying to do, well, things get really complicated. And that’s not even getting into the trouble Frank’s son and his girlfriend get into when they play hooky from school right when the convicts are on the loose and looking for shelter – and Frank’s newly purchased cabin in the middle of nowhere might just be the perfect hideout.
If your head is starting to hurt combing through that very truncated synopsis, well, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on in the show – too much, to be frank. The series is set up as a cat and mouse tale, with Havlock our slippery Moriarty, always several steps ahead of his pursuers – those would be Frank and Sidney, who are hunting him for two very different reasons that often have the pair of them at loggerheads as well. We’re constantly told – by Sidney – that Havlock is brilliant, a manipulator, someone who will get in your head and use you until you’re no longer useful and then burn you. But the writing – from showrunners Jon Bokenkamp and Richard D’Ovidio and their writing staff – doesn’t want to show us just who he is and what he’s capable of. It’s the slowest of slow reveals (often in poorly inserted flashbacks that show us precious little that we haven’t already deduced from context clues), all while the show is juggling other – less important – plotlines.
Adding to the strange tone of the series are the action sequences which caused me to have a feeling of déjà vu on more than one occasion. Now, I’m not the biggest action fan, but when I’m watching a set piece and can figure out just where I saw that same type of escape sequence play out previously, well, that’s telling me that it’s a touch too similar. While I don’t watch a lot of action movies, I do know that a crucial piece of making a story like this work is that we care about the characters within the story. Here, it’s really hard to care all that much about any of them – save, perhaps, for Kessell’s Sarah, but that’s largely because Kessell does a hell of a lot with a good supporting role in the early going of the series. Clarke does his best with a very underwritten, stereotypical “cop hero” character (tragic elements of his past, a man who loves his family and town, good at his job but susceptible to influence from a charismatic criminal, etc.). Bennett is incredibly flat and one-note as Sidney, a character with a clear reason to want to catch Havlock, but without any real emotional presence within a story that desperately needs some emotional stakes. And Cooper, well, aside from a suspect American accent (at least I think that’s what he’s going for), he’s perfectly fine as the enigmatic villain of the piece. But the show needs to keep him and his motivations mysterious for a good stretch of the story to keep us coming back for more, which hinders a lot of what Cooper can do. Turning on the charm, smirking, dropping hints as to his past relationship with Sidney and the cards he holds that might impact Frank’s carefully rebuilt life in Alaska are all well and good, but that doesn’t make a character worth watching.
What The Last Frontier really needed was to either give us more with the various convicts we meet and then see captured with little to no fanfare or to ignore all of them and put the focus squarely on Havlock. After all, he’s the true glue holding this particular story together. He connects are various key leads (Woodard plays the head of government agency that has sent Sidney in to extract him so that he can be put away for good – ideally six feet underground). He’s the one tempting our hero Frank to potentially take steps he normally wouldn’t. But we spend precious little time watching this relationship play out in the early episodes which hinders it when it really matters later in the game. Which is frustrating, because with a cast like this, The Last Frontier could have been way more than just a run of the mill thriller. It could have been really special. As it stands, it’s a dime a dozen type of show.
The Last Frontier premieres on Friday, October 10 on AppleTV+.
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