‘Untamed' Review: A National Park Procedural From Netflix
On one hand, you can't help wondering whether all those rangers would have time to investigate a mysterious death on the face of El Capitan when the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff since President Trump took office again. Aren't there restrooms that need cleaning?
On the other, hiring rangers who look like Eric Bana and Lily Santiago — who play the primary investigators of that mysterious death — might be explained as part of the recent 'Make America Beautiful Again' executive order.
Bana, 20 years along from his action-star heyday (when he appeared successively in 'Hulk,' 'Troy' and 'Munich'), plays Kyle Turner, who is not just any ranger. He's an agent of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, so he's sort of a federal cousin to the naval investigators at 'NCIS.' Maybe CBS would have gone ahead and called the show 'NPSISB,' but Netflix, cautious by nature, has gone with 'Untamed.'
The title refers both to the landscape — mountainous British Columbia locations stand in for California — and to Turner, a laconic loner with a tragic back story and an entire Douglas fir's worth of chips on his shoulder. Even his horse thinks he's too intense.
With Bana playing a modern lawman hemmed in by bureaucracy and fueled by guilt and resentment, 'Untamed' sits between neo-frontier soap opera (like 'Yellowstone') and neo-western crime drama (like 'Dark Winds' or the late, lamented 'Longmire'). Mark L. Smith, who created the show with his daughter Elle Smith, has experience in this region of the American imagination, having played up the brutal aspects of the western mythos as a co-writer of 'The Revenant' and creator of an earlier Netflix mini-series, 'American Primeval.'
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