First season
An amnesiac man after a traffic accident, apparently provoked, desperately searches for his identity in the Australian desert in this irregular crossover of genres that reminds us that it is not necessary to extend a series so much
Needless to say, there are many series that should last a single season. Prolonging a good idea, until it loses its meaning and much of its grace, is what marks the success of large audiences, sometimes a heavy burden when we talk about creativity. A ten-part session can also be a terrible drag. There are proposals that with three chapters go from sobriety to boredom, from outstanding to scraped approved or directly to suspense, as if it were a lengthened movie for no reason, fragmented for consumption in ‘streaming’. The famous transition episodes are as inevitable to stretch the gum as they are treacherous when it comes to assessing a work as a whole. The miniseries concept is becoming more and more. It responds to the widespread feeling that offering quality doesn’t necessarily mean earning a continuation on the grid. Initiatives of interest are canceled because they do not meet expectations while titles that seem nonsense continue. Perhaps that is precisely the secret of its pull. Mediocrity is not necessarily a bad thing when it is synonymous with notoriety and dazzles the masses. Originality or victory. ‘The Tourist’, recently released on HBO Max, draws on formulas to offer the viewer a serialized story that matches perfectly with the lines that open this text. It starts very well, although it expresses clichés without shame, offering a sober western of a new type, aesthetically well cared for, with a string of characters that can remind us of the Coens’ films, eccentric and endearing. However, the story is ending before reaching the halfway point of a season divided into six parts that would improve, notably, with a shorter duration.
‘The Tourist’ features an enigmatic man who doesn’t know his name. He is the victim of a brutal state of amnesia after suffering an accident on the road, caused by a truck that intentionally ran over his vehicle after a striking pursuit. From the moment he wakes up perplexed in the hospital, his obsession is to remember who he is and what his place in the world is, but what he discovers is not pleasant at all. The action takes place in Australia, in the desert, although the protagonist is Irish and all the paraphernalia that parades before our eyes can remind us of American cinema. As the footage progresses, the series takes advantage of the road-movie structure to reveal itself as a worthy thriller, full of twists that attend to the puzzle that its main character intends to solve, whom Jamie Dornan embodies with charisma, the handsome man from ‘Fifty Shades of Gray ‘, who is accompanied in the frame by Danielle Macdonald (‘Skin’), Damon Herriman (‘Justified’) and Shalom Brune-Franklin (‘Line of Duty’). He desperately searches for his identity, running into peculiar people who help him on his strange journey, or rather put things in his place. The series works very well as a crossover of genres until its fourth installment, where the rhythm falls hopelessly and there are some unfortunate script decisions that take the plot to the absurd, in a bad way. The mysterious tone, with touches of black humor, is distorted and what happens continues to progress in fits and starts, with little substance, surrendering at times to a surrealism integrated with difficulty. We are, therefore, before a clear example of a series that is seen with pleasure until its third chapter. From the fourth the house of cards wobbles until it loses its balance due to the use and abuse of the shoehorn. It’s sad not to continue until the -unsatisfactory- resolution of the adventure, but the multiscreen viewer has the power to stop whenever he likes. He wields the magic wand that allows him to choose what he sees and stop when he plays. It is not necessary to finish a book if it stops being interesting halfway through. It is healthy, at this point, to enjoy a series as far as it goes. There is too much supply.
‘The Tourist’ is available on HBO Max.
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