-Desiderius Erasmus
I recently watched the 2022 HBO series The Tourist starring Jamie Dornan and Danielle Macdonald. It was... okay, I guess... not great. There were only six episodes so I finished it, but if it had been any longer I probably would have abandoned the show. Dornan stars as a traveler in Australia who is run off the road deliberately by an 18-wheeler, causing his car to flip and him to be badly injured. When he wakes up in the hospital it's to find that, due to head trauma, he has amnesia and can't remember anything, including his name. Macdonald is Probationary Constable Helen Chambers, a rookie cop sent to the hospital to make a report about the accident. She feels sympathy for the attractive amnesiac; I often wonder how much help the people at the center of these sorts of plots would get if they looked like say, Jackie Gleason instead of Jamie Dornan. It's also very convenient that his injuries didn't result in him having to get patches of his hair shaved off, or any unsightly facial swelling and/or sutures... but I digress. Chambers inadvertently gets drawn in over her head as her attempts to help Dornan's character figure out who he is expose her to murderous baddies who for some reason are trying to chase down and kill the nameless man. The first episode is actually pretty good- obviously it was interesting enough for me to continue watching- but it all rather derails as the show goes on. This isn't to say that everything about the show is bad; Dornan is quite competent in his role as the Man with amnesia, and Macdonald is a very natural actress. But they're saddled with an increasingly bloated, meandering plot and too many odd characters. The odd characters are a distraction; The Tourist seems to be trying for a Fargo vibe, where every character has weird personality quirks or funny eccentricities, except they're Australian, not from the American mid-west. In fact, a lot of elements in The Tourist seem lifted from other- better- movies/shows. An amnesiac with skills he can't explain who's being chased by killers- Jason Bourne. Car chases through great expanses of the Australian outback- Road Warrior. A baddie with a constantly changing story about a part of his back story- The Dark Knight. That last dude, an assassin hired by the actual top bad guy, is a good example of what I'm talking about. He's a beefy, slow moving, caricature of an American redneck complete with gaudy cowboy boots and hat- rather inexplicably, since the show is set in Australia. Every time he's about to kill someone, he tells them what his mother did for a living, and it's something different each time. There's no reason for him to do this; he's not even explaining away scars or anything. But apropos of nothing, we get the spiel about his mum, seemingly because the writers had seen The Dark Knight, too and thought it was a way to make him seem more mysterious and creepy. There's no pay off for it, so it seems like a rather pointless waste of time- one of many. Also, at one point this guy gets stabbed and pushed down a dry well. One would assume that he was dead, especially after lying there under the hot sun in Australia for hours, but no. Somehow- weighing about 300 pounds, with a huge stab wound in his back- he regains consciousness and manages to scale the apparently smooth inside of the well all the way to the top. Then, with no medical attention, heads off on his merry way after his next victim. Now, I understand winking a little at unlikely situations for the sake of the story, but there are limits. I mean, come now. Speaking of unlikely, The Tourist relies on the local police force being abjectly stupid. In Fargo, the police were eccentric perhaps, but competent. Not here, though. At one point in the story, the house of the elderly couple Dornan's character is renting a room from is attacked by the assassin (Billy Nixon) while Dornan, Helen, and Luci Miller (another character) are there, trying to charge a cell phone they need information from. Nixon arrives and shoots up the place, killing the old man who owns the house. Dornan and Luci flee on foot, making for an old barn on the property to hide, and Nixon hops in his truck to chase them down (this is where he gets stabbed and welled). The cops arrive at the house, sling up police tape, take away the body, and... don't do anything else. They know- Helen is there to tell them- that Dornan and Luci ran off on foot, pursued by a gun toting murderer. Yet they don't bring police dogs, don't search the property, outbuildings, or anything else, as far as I can see. They don't even search the house; the charging phone is in plain sight on the kitchen counter and never even gets a second glance. The show seriously lags in the center section, spending time on stuff that doesn't further the story and isn't particularly interesting. For example, it often cuts away to Helen's relationship with her fiance, a passive aggressive man-child. He's such a chowderhead that you know Helen is going to give him the boot eventually- which she does, in the final episode. But it's so obvious that it makes all the scenes they have- going to dieters anonymous, to dance lessons, to the wedding planners- with him whingeing at her all the time, extremely tiresome because you know that this relationship is going nowhere, and the writers are just making him extra awful so that no one will care when she throws him over. There are a bunch of plot holes if you bother to think about what's going on; Dornan's character isn't Australian, he's Irish. He's hospitalized at least twice, with no ID, no wallet, and so obviously no insurance. How is he not only getting treatment, but occupying a private room? And how is he paying to eat and stay at different places, etc? Helen gave him a little pocket money she had on her, but how far does that go? These are nit-picky things which could be overlooked if the story itself was more interesting. Unfortunately, it's not. In addition, there're too many flashbacks for my taste. The show frequently flashes back to what happened to Dornan's character- we eventually find out that his name is Elliot- and also to the past, and childhood, of the main villain. Also, as fragments of his memory resurface, Elliot is having mental flashbacks, seeing indecipherable images in his brain. At the same time, the baddie has schizophrenia or something; he has another personality, or imaginary friend whom he talks to, and who eggs him on in his villainy. Between the show's flashbacks, Elliot's mental images, and the bad guy's hallucinations, there's a bit too much happening in the show which isn't in the present day, real world. In the final episode, Elliot decides that he can't live with what he's found out about himself. Alone in his hotel room, he ODs on pills and booze and then calls Helen, wanting to hear her voice as he fades out. This is where the show ends, and we're supposed to be wondering if he actually dies, or if Helen calls the EMTs in and he ends up getting his stomach pumped, or what. Mostly though, I was just wondering how he paid for a hotel room, pills, and a bottle of booze. Which is probably a good sign that I wasn't very invested in this story or its characters. In any case, I think we can safely say that he doesn't die because it was recently announced that there's going to be a second series.
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