‘Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You’ Review: Netflix’s Contrived Conspiracy Thriller

ITin’t struggle it: The rubric “I testament regain You” makes me think of Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992) and his famous plea to Madeleine Stowe to “stay alive” after she’s taken prisoner by the Hurons. It doesn’t help that Ms. Stowe shows up in this Harlan Coben thriller. Or that the eight-part series will have a viewer feeling like he’s been dragged off into a forest of hostile plotlines.Co-created by Robert Hull, Mr. Coben’s “I Will Find You” is based—like more than a dozen other adaptations of the author’s novels—on cockamamie contrivances and a curious tweak on the mystery thriller. Audiences may not be overeager to find out whodunit. But they will be intrigued to discover how the writers will write themselves out of corners. Also, how far they’ll push the deep-seated paranoia on which thrillers like this have not only thrived but helped to cultivate. You mean there are all-powerful organizations out there in evildoer land that know all, see all, and bend reality to their nefarious wishes? That operate in complete anonymity? In a world where no one can keep a secret? Am I trying to ruin the fun?“I Will Find You” is fun, as long as you don’t mind a mystery that makes no sense (a common Coben problem) and take no offense when outrageous coincidences are passed off as artful plotting. Consider former Boston attorney/law professor and current federal inmate David Burroughs (Sam Worthington). He’s serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of his 3-year-old son, whose body could be identified only through its DNA. (Aha, you say.) David has always insisted on his innocence, but for five years has refused visitors. But one day his sister-in-law, disgraced ex-Boston Globe reporter Rachel Mills (Britt Lower, “Severance”), shows up with a picture, a selfie taken by friends at an amusement park. And there, in the background. . . You see? A boy of about 8. With a red birthmark on his face! Just like the late Matthew’s! He’s alive!You think that’s something? The warden at David’s prison, Phillip Mackenzie (Peter Outerbridge), is not just the father of David’s boyhood friend, Boston cop Adam Mackenzie (Jonathan Tucker), he’s the ex-partner of David’s cop father, Lenny (Hugh Thompson). All of them conspired to get David off of the murder charge, even though they thought he might have been guilty. And now Phillip and Adam conspire to break David out of prison. Who needs a deep state, corporate skulduggery and/or child trafficking when you have the Boston police? And how did someone named Wahlberg not wind up in this?One of the strategies adopted by Mr. Coben and company is to keep the improbabilities coming. Everything that happens does so because a picture of a kid looks like a child who died. And whose DNA matched the boy’s bloodied bed. But the fact that people start trying to murder David hints at something else, something that starts to convince the people close to him—and the people chasing him—that perhaps justice went unserved.Mr. Worthington is sort of a cinema phenomenon, having appeared in some of the biggest movies ever (the “Avatar” franchise, “Terminator: Salvation,” “Clash of the Titans”) without having become a household name. If it was a career plan, it was brilliant. Neither he nor any of his Coben cohort—Ms. Lower, Ms. Stowe, Erin Richards, Clancy Brown—are doing much with the material, but the material isn’t much. Chi McBride and Logan Browning, as the father-daughter FBI team chasing David around a very Canadian New York (shot mostly in Toronto), are far more abrasive than is palatable. The commitment overall seems lacking, though Milo Ventimiglia (“This Is Us”) gives one interesting performance, as Rachel’s old boyfriend Hayden (son of Ms. Stowe’s imperiously malevolent foundation-managing Gertrude Payne). But Hayden is something of a contrivance, too, a would-be suitor with bottomless pockets whose palatial apartment becomes a safe house and who seems able to clear the streets of Manhattan anytime someone needs to make a getaway. He’s fantastic. So fantastic he’s hard to believe.Harlan Coben’s I Will Find YouThursday, NetflixMr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.