'Whoa, these VR goggles are amazing. It's almost as if there really is an explosion right next to me.' Photos: Handout
Follow us and ponder the question: "What if... Con Air crashed in Alaska?" That's not a spoiler, but a premise, specifically that of the Apple TV thriller series The Last Frontier.
Like that cheesy, hugely memorable 1997 Nic Cage movie, the convict-filled flight here even has a shackled, hooded and presumably highly dangerous criminal occupying a whole row of seats by himself.
Of course, things go wrong, and the plane comes down on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska – not quite 30 Days Of Night territory (technically, 67 days) but pretty snowbound.
That's smack in the jurisdiction of US Marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), a man with a deep, dark secret and some past trauma that have led to strained ties with his family: his nurse wife Sarah (Simone Kessell) and their wilful teen son Luke (Tait Blum).
Along comes Sidney Scofield (Haley Bennett), a CIA agent assigned to find and, um, retrieve or neutralise the hooded individual.
'I reckon if we head south a bit, we ought to run into those Yellowjackets. I hear they have a full larder.'
The Last Frontier comes to us courtesy of, among others, Jon Bokenkamp, creator of the 10-season The Blacklist, which should give us a hint as to the nature of this particular fugitive.
Havlock (Dominic Cooper, the MCU's WWII-era Howard Stark), supposedly a rogue CIA asset, is a slightly more spry and somewhat less urbane analogue of James Spader's Raymond Reddington, though still cunning and canny and seemingly always several steps ahead of his pursuers.
The opening episode is helmed by Sam Hargrave, who directed Extraction and Extraction 2 over on Netflix, so that should give you an idea of what to expect.
Indeed, one ambush scene is so desperate and frenetic that it thrusts us right into the unsteady perspective of the individuals involved as they fight for their very survival.
It's a standout sequence that does the series the unfortunate disservice of making it peak too soon, as action bits go.
Also on the positive side, everyone in the show's fairly large cast, from the cops to the cons, family and friends to victims and bystanders, really puts their heart into it.
After this riveting debut, however, The Last Frontier starts to sputter a little as it gets its gears tangled in a skein of secrets, lies, frankly unnecessary soapy tropes, and... more lies.
Is anything Sidney says even remotely true? At the rate she drops one surprising (purported) revelation after another in just the next three episodes, it's amazing how Frank keeps letting her tag along after all his half-hearted threats to cut her loose.
The extra playing 'Background FBI Agent #1' was truly impressed to see such symmetry in posing between the series leads.
Remember how most episodes of The Blacklist revolved around the latest uber-criminal on the titular list and Reddington's unfolding grand scheme?
The Last Frontier soon drops into a similar groove, tackling the escaped con(s) of the week while peeling back the layers of Havlock's plan – and at only the halfway mark of the 10-episode debut season, it's too early to call it "sinister". Or anything.
The who/what/where/why of the plane crash soon becomes so conspiracy theory-riddled that it beggars the Jackson Lamb "five Fs" approach (if you've watched the Slow Horses Season Six trailer, you'd know, wink wink).
Not to mention the many traumatic things that happen to the Remnicks, both in the present and past (as alluded to so far); or the sudsy backstory between Sidney and Havlock; or the CIA politicking and base-covering involving Havlock between Sidney's boss Jacqueline Bradford (an as-yet-underused Alfre Woodard) and her as-yet-unnamed boss, played by John Slattery (too many Howard Starks – someone call the TVA).
We get that Alaska's a vast place, but trying to cram all this into anything less than a 22-episode network TV season just leaves the initial episodes of The Last Frontier bursting at the seams.
Creaky as this first half has been under the burden of all that forced exposition and foreshadowing, we're not fully convinced that there'll be much in the way of rewards for the patient viewer. Unless, at some point, they abandon all credibility, go the whole hog, and send a polar bear after the teenage son. IYKYK.
New episodes of The Last Frontier arrive on Apple TV every Friday.
Summary:
Pure as the driven suds
