Apple TV+ thriller ‘The Last Frontier’ is snowed in with pulpy action and cheap melodrama | TV/Streaming

It’s simple: Watch the first episode of Apple TV+’s new action thriller “The Last Frontier” for hope. At least because of its action sequences, anyway, and the sordid fun of its premise: a Con Air-like passenger transport crashes spectacularly in the Alaskan forest, unleashing dozens of dangerous criminals who will kill and plot for their last shot at freedom, and the only guy who can stop them is a headstrong small-town sheriff with surprising fighting chops. But as the ten-episode season drags on, the thrills of its action sequences give way to the kind of tedious bloat you might expect in, well, your average Apple TV+ show.

That’s a real shame, given that the series is partly the product 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 that series with Richard D’Ovidio). The problem is that it’s a networking job with prestige clothes, and the big-budget dressing paradoxically gets in the way of how ridiculous the show wants to be.

Hargrave, who directs the pilot, sets the table with mechanical efficiency. After the stunning plane crash sequence, a feat of fight choreography in the middle of a burning and crashing ocean liner, we cut to the small town these bad guys are about to assault. We meet our aforementioned sheriff, Marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), a family man trying to rebuild his life with his wife (Simone Kessell) and son (Tait Blum), after life in a big city traumatizes them in a way that, when viewed in flashback, reads as exploitative and clashes deeply with the tone of the rest of the series. They’re looking to slow down and start again, a basket of apples that 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 interest in reclaiming these prisoners.

From there, “The Last Frontier” oscillates between two distinct modes, one entertaining and the other frustrating: The first is a prisoner-of-the-week procedural, as one colorful escapee after another (Johnny Knoxville, Damian Young are particularly notable) wreaks havoc on the city, and the second is a broader conspiracy involving the plane’s most valuable prisoner, a former CIA agent named Havlock (Dominic Cooper), who might be the reason the plane crashed in the first place. He has plans within plans, and the season follows the cat-and-mouse game between Remnick/Scofield and Havlock and the non-prosecutive government conspiracy that entails.

Sounds like “Blacklist,” doesn’t it, with Cooper’s Havlock exchanging provocative conversations with Clarke’s Remnick in a sarcastic manner, much like James Spader’s “Red” Reddington? But “The Last Frontier”‘s biggest flaw is that it’s on Apple TV+, which means hour-long runtimes and a bloated budget/cast slate that strains the premise’s limits. Almost every episode is a grueling sixty minutes, which means that for every melee encounter with tactical gunfire 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. Plus, every few episodes brings a crazy new twist designed to upset the apple cart, but mostly leaves you perplexed wondering where it’s all going.

The show’s large cast also means it has to waste time giving everyone something to do, which often isn’t as engaging as, say, watching Clarke and Cooper throw hands at a mobile Arctic research truck suspended over a snowy cliff. Alfre Woodard and John Slattery appear from time to time, arguing over interagency politics for most of the season, which seems like a waste of both their talents; other supporting characters, like Remnick’s acerbic partner (played by Native actor Dallas Goldtooth), are given so little to do that one wonders why they value inclusion in the show’s hyperactive main titles.

When a show this unapologetically stupid is firing on all cylinders, it can be entertaining. And make no mistake, the moments when the characters in “Last Frontier” decide to stop spewing airport thriller dialogue and get down to business with blood are funny. There’s just a lot of people standing in interrogation rooms and giving briefings around the surrounding tables, and the characters themselves aren’t three-dimensional enough to lend weight to their corresponding melodrama. (Not to mention the larger conspiracy the show uncovers, which amounts to “Get this, the government is watching us all!” Yes, and?)

“The Last Frontier” is the kind of series that will open with a crying flashback to a child being shot senseless in a car with her father holding her dying body, then ten minutes later give us a giant, naked, framed escapee throwing cops around a warehouse to “Dancing in the Moonlight” before being electrocuted by a puddle. Unless you’re into something like “9-1-1,” these read like two different shows. And this thing takes itself a little too seriously to drop these contradictory punches.

The entire season was screened for review. New episodes air Fridays on Apple TV+.