Did I think I Will Find You, the latest Harlan Coben thriller, was rubbish? Yes. Did I keep watching it anyway? Also yes. It’s the story of a man who is in prison for killing his young son but – hold on to your hats – his son might actually be alive. It’s formulaic and preposterous in that very Netflix way, an assembly of cliffhangers and plot reveals designed to carry us effortlessly from one episode to the next. And it does this so well that, like me, you will probably binge all eight episodes in pursuit of the ending.
We’ve become used to Coben adaptations that transpose the action to England and hire Richard Armitage/James Nesbitt as the protagonist. This one keeps its original US setting, moving between Boston and New York City. The lead role goes to Avatar actor Sam Worthington, playing the character as more Hollywood action hero than hapless everyman.
With pleasing efficiency, the premise is laid out in the first couple of minutes courtesy of Worthington’s narration. He plays David Burroughs, who is five years into a life sentence for the murder of his little boy, Matthew. Nobody believed Burroughs’s defence that someone broke into the house and committed the crime while he slept – not the police, not the jury, not his wife.
Then Burroughs’s sister-in-law, Rachel (Severance star Britt Lower), visits him in prison and offers the tantalising prospect that Matthew is still alive. How could this be, when Matthew was found dead in the house? It’s a headscratcher, and Burroughs is determined to get to the bottom of it. He just needs to break out of prison first.
What follows is a version of The Fugitive, as Burroughs strains to stay one step ahead of the FBI agents (Chi McBride and Sarah Greer) on his trail. I Will Find You sticks to the Netflix formula of doing something attention-grabbing every few minutes, ensuring that viewers never get bored.
Worthington, who occupies the unusual position of having starred in the highest-grossing film of all time (Avatar) while never ascending to A-list status, is the right actor for the role. He can do the Tom Cruise-style, roof-jumping action scenes, while also tapping into the primal emotion of a father’s determination to find his son. McBride proves a worthy adversary as the wise FBI veteran out to get his man. Madeleine Stowe overdoes the creepiness as a wealthy philanthropist.
The tightly written story involves plenty of rug pulls and twists, with almost every character on the suspect list. Who shouldn’t we trust: the prison governor? Burroughs’s dad? The mother of the ex-boyfriend of the sister-in-law? The central mystery is solved in the series finale and I doubt that you’ll guess it, partly because the writers have successfully strewn so many red herrings about the place, and partly because it’s the most stupid plot reveal in living memory.
I Will Find You is on Netflix now