It’s easy, watching the first episode of Apple TV+’s new action thriller “The Last Frontier,” to get your hopes up. At least off the back of its action sequences, anyways, and the tawdry fun of its premise: A Con Air-like passenger transport crash-lands spectacularly in the Alaskan forest, letting loose dozens of dangerous criminals who will kill and scheme for their last shot at freedom, and the only guy who can stop them is the dogged small-town sheriff with surprising combat chops. But as the ten-episode season drags on, the pulpy thrills of its action sequences give way to the kind of tedious bloat you can expect from, well, your average Apple TV+ show.
It’s a shame, really, considering the show comes partially courtesy of the kind of hands you’d want to place this kind of thriller in: “Extraction” director Sam Hargrave (a steady hand with ambitious action sequences) and “The Blacklist” creator Jon Bokenkamp (who co-created this show with Richard D’Ovidio). Problem is, it’s a work of network schlock with prestige clothing, and the big-budget dressing paradoxically gets in the way of how silly the show wants to be.
Hargrave, who directs the pilot, sets the table with clockwork efficiency. After the stunning plane crash sequence, a feat of fight choreography amid a flaming, crashing passenger liner, we zoom down to the small town those baddies are about to beset. We meet our aforementioned sheriff, Marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), a family man trying to put his life together with his wife (Simone Kessell) and son (Tait Blum), after big-city life traumatized them in ways that, when seen in flashback, read as exploitative and deeply clashing with the tone of the rest of the show. They’re looking to slow down and start over, an apple cart which this plane crash naturally upsets. Now Remnick is back in the fight, tracking down one escaped convict after another with the help of a disgraced CIA flack named Scofield (Haley Bennett), who has a personal stake in recovering these prisoners.
From there, “The Last Frontier” flits between two distinct modes, one entertaining and one frustrating: The former is a prisoner-of-the-week procedural, as one colorful escapee after another (Johnny Knoxville, Damian Young are particular standouts) wreaks havoc on the town, and the latter a broader conspiracy involving the plane’s most valued prisoner, a former CIA asset named Havlock (Dominic Cooper), who may be the reason the plane crashed in the first place. He’s got plans within plans, and the season follows the cat-and-mouse game between Remnick/Scofield and Havlock and the unsuing government conspiracy that entails.
Sounds suitably “Blacklist,” right, with Cooper’s Havlock exchanging taunting conversations with Clarke’s Remnick in a snide manner not unlike James Spader’s “Red” Reddington? But “The Last Frontier”‘s biggest liability is that it’s on Apple TV+, which means hour-long runtimes and a bloasted budget/cast list that strains the limitations of the premise. Nearly every episode is a punishing sixty minutes, which means that for every one-take melee with tactical gunplay and creative use of everything from axes to fire extinguishers, we have to sit through tepid melodrama involving Clarke’s history and family, or extended flashbacks detailing Scofield’s surprising past with Havlock. What’s more, every few episodes throws a new crazy twist meant to upset the apple cart, but mostly leaves you scratching your head wondering where this is all going.
The show’s large cast also means it has to waste time giving everyone Something to Do, which is often not as appealing as, say, watching Clarke and Cooper throw hands in a mobile arctic research truck dangling over a snowy cliffside. Alfre Woodard and John Slattery show up occasionally, bickering over inter-agency politics for most of the season, which feels like a waste of both their talents; other side characters, like Remnick’s acerbic partner (played by Native actor Dallas Goldtooth), get so little to do one wonders why they rate inclusion in the show’s hyperactive main titles.
When a show this unabashedly stupid fires on all cylinders, it can be entertaining. And don’t get me wrong, the moments when “Last Frontier”‘s characters decide to stop spitting out airport-thriller dialogue and get down to bloody business, it’s a hoot. There’s just a lot of standing around in interrogation rooms and giving briefings around chalkboards that surround it, and the characters themselves aren’t three-dimensional enough to give their corresponding melodrama any heft. (To say nothing of the broader conspiracy the show unravels, which amounts to “Get this, the government is watching all of us!” Yes, and?)
“The Last Frontier” is the kind of series that will open with a weepy flashback about a child getting gunned down senselessly in a car with her father holding her dying body, then ten minutes later give us a giant, nude, roided-out escapee throwing cops around a warehouse to “Dancing in the Moonlight” before getting electrocuted by a puddle. Unless you’re something like “9-1-1,” those read as two different shows. And this thing takes itself just a bit too seriously to let those conflicting punches land.
Whole season screened for review. New episodes air Fridays on Apple TV+.
