Summary
I Will Find You is a Harlan Coben thriller through and through, replete with all the usual nonsense and plot holes big enough to fall through, but the typical binge-ready formula remains inescapably watchable.
The Harlan Coben adaptation is a wonderfully specific and peculiar thing. Having become an annual New Year’s treat for Netflix, it feels like a bit of a novelty for one to plop off the conveyor belt in June, but these things are nothing if not remarkably efficient. They’re all the same, essentially. Here’s a compelling mystery that is captivating out of the gate, largely because it seems kind of impossible; here are a bunch of characters who seemingly don’t have any relation to one another but will invariably end up being intimately intertwined; and here are the credits, because you got totally sucked in by the rocket-fuelled pacing and page-turner structure and now you don’t quite know what to make of anything. You’ll be pleased – or perhaps not – to learn that I Will Find You performs precisely as advertised.
This is the 13th of Netflix’s Coben adaptations in a 14-book deal, which I’d say is worth making a note of, but given their immense popularity and review-proof nature, it’s likely that the ink isn’t even dry on the re-up. Either way, if you’ve seen any of the others, like Missing You, Fool Me Once, and Run Away, you’ve essentially seen this, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from watching it since they’re all designed not only to resemble one another but to entertain in precisely the same way. And across eight lightning-fast episodes ideally designed for a hungry, guilty binge, one thing that this show does is entertain, sometimes in spite of itself.
The plot finds haunted everyman David Burroughs (Sam Worthington, The Titan, Fractured) serving a life sentence in a Maine penitentiary for beating his young son to death with a baseball bat. David maintains that he’s innocent of the crime, but all the evidence implicated him in the kind of open-and-shut way that virtually guarantees he was framed. But the twist isn’t that he’s innocent; it’s that his apparent victim may well still be alive.
This news comes courtesy of David’s sister-in-law, Rachel (Britt Lower, Severance), who visits him in prison with a random photo from a friend’s Facebook page which seems to depict David’s dead son, complete with a tell-tale facial birthmark, enjoying a day out at Six Flags. As soon as David has latched onto the idea of this, multiple attempts are made on his life, kind of proving his point. Luckily, the prison warden, Philip Mackenzie (Peter Outerbridge, It: Welcome to Derry), was the partner of David’s father back in their Boston PD days, and is himself the father of David’s childhood best friend, Adam (Jonathan Tucker), so together they contrive a prison escape so David can get ahead of the conspiracy and hopefully, with help from Rachel, find his still-living son.
Unlike most Coben adaptations, I Will Find You is set in the U.S., and pings between Maine, Boston, and New York, as David and Rachel dig into a conspiracy that very quickly begins to implicate corrupt cops, crime families, and billionaire philanthropists. On their tail are father-and-daughter FBI agents Williams (Chi McBride) and Greer (Logan Browning), the rare TV Feds who actually seem to know what they’re doing, and ironically provide a much more emotionally engaging throughline than anything to do with David and his dead kid.
There are twists and turns aplenty, death-defying chases rendered in an incomprehensible editing style, stilted performances and highly questionable writing and plotting – everything you’d ever want or need in a show like this. None of it makes sense when you really think about it, and nobody talks or behaves in the way a human being might, but none of it matters, since these shows are scientifically designed to be watchable in a frustratingly inescapable way. It’s almost impossible to not find out what happens. The less sense it makes, somehow the more enjoyable it is. I can’t say I understand it, but the scale of the audience these things reliably pull in suggests I’m far from the only one who finds myself gobbling them down without question.
Buckle up, in other words. You’ll have no idea how you got to the finish line once you reach it, but you’ll be surprised how quickly and excitedly you get there.
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