We’re pretty lucky to have these streaming platforms. You hear about a new show, but out of laziness or because you want to pace your imagination, you don’t rush to watch the episodes the second they drop. Instead, you wait for the whole season to finish and… Bingo! You get to have your whole cake in one sitting.
That’s pretty much what I did with I Will Find You, the eight-episode Netflix miniseries based on Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. It’s the first American Netflix adaptation of one of Coben’s novels, with showrunner Robert Hull at the helm.
In the lead role, we find Sam Worthington, best known for the Avatar franchise, playing David Burroughs, a father serving a life sentence for the murder of his own son. Starring alongside him are Britt Lower, Milo Ventimiglia, Chi McBride, Logan Browning, Clancy Brown, and Madeleine Stowe—a cast solid enough to make you confident you’re in for a few good hours of thriller action.
That’s what yours truly based his expectations on, and precisely because of these premises, my expectations were a bit… let’s call them demanding. Netflix, Worthington, Harlan Coben, Robert Hull… It sounded very, very promising.
The first few minutes were promising, too; it jumped right into the action with a monologue by David Burroughs, played by Sam Worthington. The guy ended up in prison because, while sleepwalking, he supposedly killed his son with a baseball bat. He cut all ties with his family, but in the first “moving” scene of the show, we see him taken to the visitor’s room to meet his sister-in-law, Rachel Mills, played rather unconvincingly by Britt Lower. The character remains surprisingly flat, and Britt Lower fails to convey enough tension or desperation.
Rachel shows him a photo suggesting that Matthew might still be alive. From here on out, the action rushes forward, and believability goes right out the window. David escapes—a far-fetched and, at times, ridiculous escape, of course—and starts looking for his boy. His trusty sidekick is none other than Rachel, whose performance still isn’t very convincing.
Cliches abound at every turn, and the plot twists are predictable and completely clichéd, meaning they bring nothing new to the table. It’s fiction, sure, but you know what they say about a lie, right? If you want others to believe your lies, you have to half-believe them yourself. I doubt the writer, the director, and everyone involved in this series believed even a quarter of what they served up as an action flick. Speaking of a flick… this whole nonsense could have been condensed into a three-hour movie; an eight-episode series wasn’t necessary.
The whole “it’s not your fault” thing was repeated by pretty much all the characters to an annoying degree. Come on, man, nobody is guilty of anything. It brings to mind the already legendary irresponsibility of the Romanian people, where no one takes accountability for anything. It’s not your fault, you couldn’t have known… A lot of problems and pointing fingers, but no actual culprit. Plus, the FBI agents are as implausible as it gets. I’m guessing the budget wasn’t that great, either.
All in all, I’m not saying it’s unwatchable or that it deserves to be completely ignored, but it needed to be more believable, with a more realistic resolution to its conflicts. The problem with I Will Find You isn’t that it tells an impossible story. Thrillers thrive on exaggerations. The problem is that, past a certain point, the script stops trying to convince the viewer that what they’re seeing might have at least some internal logic. It remains an easy binge for a weekend, but way below the potential promised by Harlan Coben’s name and the cast Netflix put together.
Is it worth watching? It’s no masterpiece, but for lack of anything better… Though, let’s be honest, you can definitely find something better out there