The Tourist, the mini-series with Jamie Dornan, mixes action, thriller and absurd humor – with a pleasant if slightly disappointing result at the end.
What is The Tourist? A man (Jamie Dorman) wakes up in a hospital bed. He doesn’t know who he is, has no memory of having had an accident and doesn’t know what he’s doing in Australia. When a young policewoman (Danielle Macdonald) shows up to take his statement, he decides to flee to try to solve the mystery of his identity and his amnesia. What he doesn’t know is that someone is determined to kill him.
The essential
The Tourist is a co-production by Britain’s BBC and Australia’s Stan. Created by brothers Harry Williams and Jack Williams (The missing), worn by actor Jamie Dornan (the serial killer of The Fall or the Christian of 50 Shades of Gray), this mini-series in six episodes is coming to our screens, on France 2 and France.tv.
The tourist is centered on an anonymous character because of amnesia, who is completely unaware of who he is. The mystery of the identity of the one who is nicknamed “The Man” is undeniably the driving force behind all the action and the whole story. As a viewer, we don’t know much more than him: we only saw him driving through the Australian outback, stopping for a toilet at a run-down gas station, then being chased by a tractor-trailer who violently pushes him off the road in a scene at the Duel by Steven Spielberg. Other than that, we’re in total limbo. Who is he ? Who is trying to kill him and why? What is this guy with the strong Irish accent doing in Australia? So many questions to which we will discover the answers at the same time as him, as he retraces his steps, the places he apparently frequented and the people he met.
WE love
After this starting point, which is certainly classic but still effective because it is intriguing and full of promise, The Tourist drifts rather quickly in a kind of cross-over between Jason Bourne and Fargo. From the saga of espionage, the series borrows a hero threatened but who does not know by whom or why since he has amnesia, and who tries to reconstruct his past and what precipitated him into such a situation; there are also many extremely effective action scenes (shootouts, car chases, etc.) and many twists.
As for the Coen brothers’ film (or the series drawn from it by Noah Hawley), The Tourist takes wide shots of the landscapes (here, the Australian Outback with all that that implies of wild nature, dusty roads in the heart of the bush and crushing heat), a humor that oscillates between the macabre, the ridiculous and the absurd, ironic violence and an unexpected range of characters, each stranger than the next.
Among them are, for example, Helen (Danielle Macdonald – unbelievable), the inexperienced cop who aptly recalls the character of Frances McDormand in Fargo ; dogged detective Lachlan Rogers (Damon Herriman of justified) who is also trying to find out who our mystery man is, a crazy Greek gangster (Alex Dimitriades, seen in Hartley Raw Hearts or more recently The slap); a cowboy who shoots first and argues later (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, the hero of Trapped), a young waitress named Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin) who will help our hero in his quest for identity. And our hero, of course, a perfect character for Jamie Dornan who, as in The Fall, is definitely at ease when it comes to playing mysterious, taciturn, dark guys… but full of resources.
We love less
After spectacular and breathless beginnings, The tourist still tends to weaken. It loses pace with nearly hour-long episodes, and some twists are more shocking than relevant, since they don’t really have any narrative justification.
Furthermore, the idea of offering us a Fargo Australian is not fully mastered. The secondary protagonists compete for the honorary title of the wackiest – but without contributing anything substantial and, contrary to what the Coen brothers were able to do, without giving them any depth (with the exception of the young cop, Helen). . However, the main criticism that can be made of the series lies in its outcome, hasty and a little frustrating: when we begin to learn more about the past of our amnesic, we say to ourselves that the initial mystery does not hold. really all its promises.
We see if… we like action series full of adrenaline, galleries of eccentric characters and the thriller / comedy mix à la Fargo. If you just want a short and effective series that does its job. If we tell ourselves that there are worse things than spending six hours in the company of Jamie Dornan…
We don’t see if… we are looking for a series totally different from what we are used to seeing. If you want to be surprised or even destabilized by the end, to be held in suspense from start to finish without downtime.
The Tourist.
6 episodes of 50′
On France 2 from June 20 and on France.tv